RITISH BATTLE
BY
HI LAI RE BELLOC
s
IS
POITIERS
Captal At Bach* rufc \ *\N < - -, V v#x o
T
POITIERS
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
LONDON
HUGH REES, LTD.
5 REGENT STREET, PALL MALL, S.W.
CONTENTS
PART PAGE
INTRODUCTION .... 9
I. THE CAMPAIGN . . . .18
II. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE
ACTION 33
III. THE TERRAIN . . . .47
IV. THE ACTION 68
V. THE ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES . 102
VI. THE RESULTS OF THE BATTLE . 115
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Coloured Plan of the Battle .
Plan No. 1 page 12
No. 2 ,,32
No. 3 ..... 49
No. 4 61
POITIERS
INTRODUCTION
THE Battle of Poitiers was fought ten years
and four weeks after that of Crecy.
The singular similarity between the two
actions will be pointed out upon a later
page. For the moment it must suffice to
point out that Poitiers and Crecy form
unique historical parallels, distinguishing
like double summits the English successes
of Edward III.'s army upon the Conti-
nent and of the first part of the Hundred
Years' War.
For the political situation which had
produced that conflict, and for the objects
which Edward III. had in provoking it, I
must refer my reader to the first section of
my little book upon Crecy in this series ;
as also for the armament and organisation
of the forces that served the English crown.
There remain to be added, however, for
the understanding of Poitiers and its
9
10 POITIERS
campaign, two features which differentiate
the fighting of 1356 from that of ten years
before. These two features are : first, the
character of the commander ; and secondly,
the nature of the regions from which he
started and through which he proceeded,
coupled with the political character of the
English rule in the South of France. I will
take these points in inverse order.
When Calais had fallen and had become
an English possession in the summer of
1347 no peace followed. A truce was
patched up for some months, followed by
further truces. Through the mediation of
the Pope a final and definite treaty was
sketched, which should terminate the war
upon the cession of Aquitaine to Edward
III. in full sovereignty. The French Valois
king would perhaps have agreed to a settle-
ment which would have preserved his feudal
headship, though it would have put the
Plantagenets in virtual possession of half
France (as France was then defined). But
Edward III. would not accept the terms.
He had claimed the crown of France. He
had won his great victory at Crecy still
claiming that crown. He would not be
content with adding to his feudal tenures
under the French crown. He would add
to his sovereignty at least, to his absolute
INTRODUCTION 11
sovereignty, or continue the war. In 1354
(the Black Death intervening) the war was
renewed. Edward would have been content,
not with the whole of Aquitaine, but with
complete sovereignty over the triangle
between the Garonne and the Pyrenees in the
south, coupled with complete sovereignty
over the north-eastern seaboard of France
from the Somme to Calais, and inland as far
as Arras, and its territory, the Artois. But
the French monarchy, though ready to
admit feudal encroachments, would not
dismember the nominal unity of the king-
dom : just as a stickler in our north will
grant a 999-year lease, but will not sell.
The result of. this breach in the negotia-
tions was that Edward, and his son the
Black Prince, entered upon the renewal of
the war with a vague claim to Aquitaine
as a whole, with an active claim upon
Guienne that is, the territory just north of
the Garonne and a real hold upon Gascony ;
and still preserving at the back of the whole
scheme of operations that half -earnest, half-
theatrical plan for an Anglo-French mon-
archy under the house of Plantagenet which
had been formulated twenty - five years
before.
It must be clearly grasped by the general
reader how natural was both the real and
INTRODUCTION 13
the fantastic side of that pursuit. It in-
volved no question of nationality as we
should now understand it. It was based
upon still living traditions of feudal con-
nections which were personal and not
racial ; the chivalry of France and England
was a French-speaking society based upon
common ideals and fed with common
memories. Gascony was in favour of the
Plantagenets. Further, Guienne the dis-
trict north of Gascony beyond the Garonne
was Edward's feudal own. He was not
king of it, but he was feudal lord of it, and
had done homage for it in 1331 to the Valois.
It was not a new or distant tie. For the
rest of the quarrel my first section in the
essay on Crecy already alluded to must
suffice, but for the link with Gascony a
more particular emphasis is needed. The
trade of Bordeaux, its great town, was
principally with British ports. Its export
of wine was a trade with Britain. It lay
far from the centre of the French monarchy.
It had counted in its Basque population an
element indifferent for hundreds of years to
the national unity of Gaul. The moneyed
interests of its great commercial centres,
of the western ones, at least (which were by
far the richest), were closely bound up with
England, with English trade. Add to this
14 POITIERS
his actual feudal tenure of Guienne, and we
can see how the feeling that all the south-
west corner of France was his grew to be a
very real feeling in Edward's mind, and was
shared by his son.
When, therefore, upon the 20th September
1355, Edward, the Black Prince, landed at
Bordeaux, it was to find a province the
nobles of which were honestly attached to
his cause and the greater townsmen as well ;
while in the mass of the people there was
no disaffection to the idea of this one out
of the vague, many, French-speaking feudal
lords whom they knew to be their masters,
being the actual governor of the land.
There was no conquest, nor any need for it,
so far as Gascony was concerned ; and in any
expedition the Prince might make he was as
certain of a regular following from the towns
and estates that lay between the mountains
and the Garonne as the King of France was
certain of his own feudal levies in the north.
But expeditions and fighting there would
be because the Black Prince came with a
commission not only to govern Gascony,
but to establish himself in the more doubt-
ful Guienne, and even to be if he could
conquer it the lieutenant of his father,
Edward, in all Aquitaine. He was to
recover the districts immediately north of
INTRODUCTION 15
the Garonne, and even (in theory, at least)
right up to the neighbourhood of the Loire ;
and (in theory, again) he was to regard those
who might resist his administration of all
these " lost " countries of the Central and
Southern West of France as " rebels."
It was thought certain at first, of course,
that the whole claim could never be pushed
home ; but the Black Prince might well
hope so to harry the districts which were
claimed and the neighbouring county of
Toulouse to the east, which was admittedly
feudatory to the King of Paris as to com-
pel that sovereign to recognise at last his
father's absolute sovereignty over Gascony
certainly, and perhaps over Guienne, or even
somewhat more than Guienne.
The remainder of that year, 1355, there-
fore the autumn and the winter were
spent in striking at the sole portion of
Gascony that was disaffected (that of
Armagnac), and pushing eastward to ravage
Toulouse and Carcassonne ; for though these
towns were admittedly outside Edward's
land, the wasting of their territory was a
depletion of the King of France's revenue.
The Black Prince did more. In the early
part of the next year, 1356, he set up his
flag upon Perigueux, some days' march to
the north of his father's real boundary ;
16 POITIERS
and, as the year proceeded, he planned
an advance far to the northward of that,
which advance was to be taken in co-
operation with a descent of the Plantagenet
forces upon the other extremity of the
French kingdom.
As to the character of the Black Prince,
which so largely determined what is to
follow, and especially his character in
command, nothing is more conspicuous in
the history of the Middle Ages. He was,
partly from the influence of models, partly
from personal force, the mirror of what the
fighting, French-speaking nobility of that
century took for its ideal conception of a
captain. Far the first thing for him was
the trade and the profession of arms, and
the appetite for combat which this career
satisfied certainly in its baser, but still more
certainly in its nobler, effects in the mind
of a virile youth. He had gone through
the great experience of Crecy as a boy of
sixteen. He was now, upon the eve of the
Campaign of Poitiers, a man in his twenty-
sixth year, thoroughly avid not only of
honour but of capture, thoroughly con-
temptuous of gain, generous with a mad
magnificence, always in debt, and always
utterly careless of it. His courage was of
the sort that takes a sharp delight in danger,
INTRODUCTION 17
and particularly in danger accompanied by
strong action ; he was an intense and a
variable lover of women, an unwearied
rider, of some (but no conspicuous) ability
in the planning of an action or the grasp of
a field, not cruel as yet (but already violent
to an excess which later years, alas ! refined
into cruelty), splendidly adventurous, and
strung every way for command. He could
and did inspire a force, especially a small
force, in the fashion which it was his chief
desire to achieve. He was a great soldier ;
but his sins doomed him to an unhappy
failure and to the wasting of his life at last.
PART I
THE CAMPAIGN
As the first of the great raids, that of Crecy,
had been designed to draw off the pressure
from Edward III.'s troops in the South of
France, and to bring the French levies north-
ward away from them, so the second great
raid ten years later, which may be called by
courtesy the " Campaign " of Poitiers, was
designed to call pressure off the English
troops in the north and to bring the French
levies down southward away from them.
As Edward's march through Normandy had
been a daring ride for booty, so was the Black
Prince's ride northward from Aquitaine ;
and as Edward from the neighbourhood of
Paris turned and retreated at top speed
from before the French host, so did the
Black Prince turn from the neighbourhood
of the Loire and retreat at speed from before
the pursuit of the bodies which the King
of France had gathered. And as the one
IS
THE CAMPAIGN 19
great raid ended in the signal victory of
O6cy, so did the other end in the signal
victory of Poitiers.
But these parallel and typical actions,
lying ten years apart, have, of course, one
main point of resemblance more important
than all the rest : each includes the com-
plete overthrow of a large body of feudal
cavalry by the trained forces of the Planta-
genets ; Crecy wholly, Poitiers partly, by the
excellence of a missile weapon the long-
bow. Each shows also a striking dispro-
portion of numbers : the little force on the
defensive completely defeating the much
larger body of the attack.
Those of my readers, therefore, who have
made themselves acquainted with the de-
tails of Orecy must expect a repetition of
much the same sort of incidents in the
details of Poitiers. The two battles are
twin, and stand out conspicuously in their
sharpness of result from the mass of con-
temporary mediaeval warfare.
In this opening section I will describe the
great ride of Edward the Black Prince
from the Dordogne to the Loire, and show
by what a march the raid proceeded to its
unexpected crisis in the final battle.
I have said that the Black Prince's object
(apart from booty, which was a main
20 POITIERS
business in all these rapid darts of the
time) was to draw the pressure from the
English troops in the north.
As a fact, the effort was wasted for any
such purpose. Lancaster, who commanded
in the north, was already in retreat before
the Black Prince had started, but that com-
mander in the south could not, under the
conditions of the time, learn the fact until
he had set off. Further, the Black Prince
hoped, by this diversion of a raid up from the
south through the centre of France, to make
it easier for King Edward, his father, to cross
over and prosecute the war in Normandy.
As a fact, the King of England never
started upon that expedition, but his son
thought he was about to do so, and said as
much in a letter to the Mayor of London.
The point of departure which the Black
Prince chose for this dash to the north was
Bergerac upon the Dordogne, and the date
upon which he broke camp was Thursday,
the 4th August 1356.
His force was an extremely small and a
very mobile one ; 3500 men-at-arms that
is, fully armoured gentlemen were the
nucleus of it ; 2500 archers accompanied
them, and it is remarkable that these archers
he mounted. Besides these 6000 riding men,
he took with him 1000 lightly armed foot-
THE CAMPAIGN 21
soldiers, and thus, with a little band of no
more than 7000 combatants all told, he
began the adventure. He had no intention
of risking action. It was his desire to take
booty, to harry, to compel the French king
to come south in his pursuit, and when that
enemy should be close upon him, at what-
ever stage this might be in his own northern
progress, to turn and ride back south as
rapidly as he had ridden north. Thus he
would draw the French feudal levies after
him, and render what he had been told
was the forthcoming English expedition
to Normandy an easy matter, free from
opposition. As things turned out, he was
able to ride north as far as the Loire before
his enemy was upon him, and it gives one
an idea of the scale on which this great
raid was planned, that from the point on
the Dordogne whence he started, to the
point on the Loire where he turned south-
ward, was in a straight line no less than
a hundred and fifty miles. As a fact, his raid
northward came to much more, for he went
round to the east in a great bend before he
came to the neighbourhood of the French
forces, and his total advance covered more
than two hundred miles of road.
Of the 7000 who marched with him,
perhaps the greater part, and certainly
22 - POITIERS
half, were Gascon gentlemen from the
south who were in sympathy with the
English occupation of Aquitaine, or, having
no sentiment one way or the other, joined
in the expedition for the sake of wealth
and of adventure. Of these were much
the most of the men-at-arms. But the
archers were for the most part English.
Raid though it was, the Black Prince's
advance was not hurried. He proposed
no more than to summon southward the
French king by his efforts, and it was a
matter of some indifference to him how far
northward he might have proceeded before
he would be compelled by the neighbourhood
of the enemy's forces to return. His high
proportion of mounted men and the light-
ness of his few foot-soldiers were for local
mobility rather than for perpetual speed ;
nor did the Black Prince intend to make a
race of it until the pursuit should begin.
Whenever that might be, he felt secure
(though in the event his judgment proved
to be wrong) in his power to outmarch any
body the King of France might bring against
him. He must further have thought that his
chance of a rapid and successful retreat, and
his power to outmarch any possible pursuers,
would increase in proportion to the size of
the force that might be sent after him.
THE CAMPAIGN 23
The raid into the north began and was
continued in a fashion not exactly leisurely,
but methodically slow. It made at first
through Perigueux to Brant ome. Thence
up through the country of the watershed to
Bellac. It turned off north-westward as
far as Lussac, and thence broke back, but
a little north of east, to Argenton.
It will be evident from the trace of such
a route that it had no definite strategic
purpose. It was a mere raid : a harrying
of the land with the object of relieving the
pressure upon the north. It vaguely held,
perhaps, a further object of impressing the
towns of Aquitaine with the presence of a
Plantagenet force. But this last feature
we must not exaggerate. The Black Prince
did not treat the towns he visited as terri-
tory ultimately to be governed by himself
or his father. He treated them as objects
for plunder.
The pace and method with which all this
early part of the business was conducted in
the first three weeks of August may be
judged by the fact that, measured along
the roads the Black Prince followed, he
covered between Bergerac and Argenton
just on a hundred and eighty miles, and
he did it in just under eighteen marching
days. In other words, he kept to a fairly
24 POITIERS
regular ten miles a day, and slowly rolled
up an increasing loot without fatiguing his
horses or his men.
From Argenton, which he thus reached
quite un weakened on the 21st of August,
he made Chateauroux (rather more than
eighteen miles off, but not nineteen by the
great road) in two days, reaching it on the
23rd. Thence he turned still more to the
eastward, and passed by Issoudun towards
Bourges. This last excursion or " elbow "
in the road was less strategically motiveless
than most of the march ; for the Prince had
had news that some French force under the
son of the French king was lying at Bourges,
and to draw off such a force southward was
part of the very vague plan which he was
following. Unlike that string of open
towns which the mounted band had sacked
upon their way, Bourges was impregnable
to them, for it was walled and properly
defended. They turned back from it,
therefore, down the River Yevre towards
the Cher Valley again, and upon the 28th
of August reached Vierzon, having marched
in the five days from Chateauroux the
regulation ten miles a day ; for they covered
fifty miles or a little more.
This point, Vierzon, is an important one to
note in the march. The town lies just to the
THE CAMPAIGN 25
south of a curious district very little known
to English travellers, or, for that matter, to
the French themselves. It is a district called
the "Sologne," that is, the "Solitarium" or
"Desert." For a space of something like
forty miles by .sixty a great isolated area of
wild, almost uncultivatable, land intervenes
between the valley of the Cher and that of
the Loire. Only one road of importance tra-
verses it, that coming from Paris and Orleans,
and making across the waste for Vierzon to
the south. No town of any size is dis-
coverable in this desolate region of stagnant
pools, scrub, low forest, and hunters.
It was such a situation on the outer edge
of the Sologne which made Vierzon the
outpost of Aquitaine, and having reached
Vierzon, the Prince, in so far as he was con-
cerned with emphasising the Plantagenet
claim over Aquitaine, had reached his north-
ern term. But his raid had, as we know,
another object : that of drawing the French
forces southward. And, with the charac-
teristic indecision of feudal strategic aims,
it occurred to the Black Prince at this
stage to immix with that object an alterna-
tive, and to see whether he could not get
across the Loire to join Lancaster's force,
which was campaigning in the West of
France on the other side of that river.
26 POITIERS
At Vierzon Edward's men came across
the first resistance. A handful of John's
forces, irregulars hired by the French king
under a leader most charmingly named
" Grey Mutton," skirmished to their dis-
advantage against the Anglo-Gascon force.
The Black Prince made back westward
after " Grey Mutton," thinking, perhaps, to
cross the Loire at Blois, and two days out
from Vierzon (rather over twenty miles) he
made the only assault upon fortifications
which he permitted his men in the whole
campaign. This was an attack upon the
Castle of Romorantin, in which " Grey
Mutton " had taken refuge.
It was not the moment for delay. Edward
knew that the French army must now be
somewhere in the neighbourhood ; he had
already touched lance with one small
French force ; but he had his teeth into the
business and would not let go his hold.
The outworks were taken early in the
affair. The keep held out for four days
more, surrendering at last to fire upon the
3rd of September.
The season was now full late if the Black
Prince intended a return to the south. But,
as we have seen, he no longer entirely
intended such a retreat. He had already
begun to consider the alternative of crossing
THE CAMPAIGN 27
the Loire and joining his brother's force
beyond it. He had information, however,
that the bridges directly in front of him
were cut. It is not easy to reconcile
this with the passage immediately after-
wards of the French army. But the most
vivid, and perhaps the most accurate,
account we have of this march not only
tells us that the bridges were cut, but par-
ticularly alludes to the high water in the
Loire at that moment. It is a significant
piece of information, because no river in
Europe north of the Pyrenees differs so
much in its volume from day to day as does
the Loire, which is sometimes a trickle of
water in the midst of sandbanks, and at
other times a great flood a quarter of a mile
across, and twenty feet deep, like the Thames
at London.
At any rate, from Romorantin, Prince
Edward made for Tours, a distance of fifty
miles as the crow flies, and a march of pre-
cisely five days. It will be observed that
his plotted rate of marching at ten miles
a day was most accurately maintained.
Now from his camp in front of Tours,
Edward behaved in a fashion singular
even for the unbusinesslike warfare of that
somewhat theatrical generation. He sat
down, apparently undecided which way to
28 POITIERS
turn, and remained in that posture during
the remainder of September the 8th, all the
next day, September 9th, and all the next
day again, the 10th. There could be no
question of attacking Tours. It was a
strong, large, and well-defended town, and
quite beyond the power of the Black Prince's
force, which was by this time encumbered
with a very heavy train of waggons carrying
his booty. But while he was waiting there
(and he could see, says one account, the
fires of his brother's army by night beyond
the Loire), his enemy, with such forces as
he had been able to collect, was marching
down upon him.
The King of France had begun to get men
together at Chartres upon the same day
that his rival had reached Vierzon, the 28th
of August. Five days later, just when
Romorantin Castle was surrendering, he
had broken up and was marching to the
Loire. And upon the same 8th of Septem-
ber which saw the Black Prince pitch his
tents under the walls of Tours, the first
bodies of the French command were be-
ginning to cross the Loire at the two upper
points of Meung and Blois, while some of
them were preparing to cross at Tours
itself.
Yet so defective was Edward's informa-
THE CAMPAIGN 29
tion that it was not until Sunday, Septem-
ber llth, that news reached him of King
John's movements. He heard upon that
day that the French king himself had crossed
at Blois, thirty miles up river behind him.
Edward at once broke camp and started on
his retreat to the south. After him as he
went followed the French host, which had
combined its forces after its separate pass-
ages of the river.
It is important, if we are to understand
what follows, to appreciate both the quality
and the numbers of those whom the King
of France had been able to gather. He
had with him, by the still necessary and
fatal military weakness of French society,
only those loose feudal levies whose lack
of cohesion had accounted ten years before
for the disaster of Crecy. But John com-
manded no such host as Philip had nomi-
nally led in the Picardy Campaign against
Edward III. At the most, and counting
all his command, it was little if at all
superior in numbers to that of the Black
Prince. He hoped, indeed, to increase it
somewhat with further levies as his progress
southward advanced, and we shall see that
his ultimate entry into the town of Poitiers
did considerably reinforce him. But at no
time before the battle which decided this
30 POITIERS
campaign was John in any important
numerical superiority over his enemy, and
even in that battle the superiority had
nothing of the dramatic disproportion which
has rendered the field of Crecy famous.
John marched down the Loire straight on
Tours. He reached Amboise, twenty miles
off, in two days, coming under that town
and castle upon Monday the 12th of
September, twenty-four hours after the
Black Prince had broken up his camp in
front of Tours. As it was now useless to
go on to Tours, John turned and marched
due south, reaching Loches, another twenty
miles away, not in two days but in one.
It was a fine forced march ; and if the
Black Prince had appreciated the mobility
of the foe, he would not have committed
the blunder which will be described in the
next section. He himself was marching
well, but, encumbered as he was by his
heavy baggage train, he covered on the
12th and 13th just less than thirty miles,
and reached the town of La Haye des
Cartes upon Tuesday the 13th, just as
John, with his mixed force of Frenchmen,
Germans, and Spaniards, was marching into
Loches, twenty miles away.
On the next day, Wednesday the 14th,
John made yet another of those astonishing
THE CAMPAIGN 31
marches which merited a better fate than
the disaster that was to conclude them,
covered the twenty miles between Loches
and La Haye, and entered the latter town
just as the Black Prince was bringing his
men into Chatellerault, only fifteen miles in
front of him. Both the commanders, pur-
suing and pursued, had been getting re-
markable work out of their men ; for even
the Black Prince, though the slower of the
two, had covered forty -five miles in three
days. But John in that determined ad-
vance after him had covered forty miles in
two days.
With John's entry into La Haye des
Cartes and Edward's leaving that town
twenty-four hours ahead of him, we enter
the curious bit of cross -marching and con-
flicting purposes which may properly be
called " The Preliminaries " of the Battle
of Poitiers, and it is under this title that I
shall deal with them in the next section.
..>BUck Priruxs Track
's
CHAT ELL |RAULT
i
CHAUV1<2N\
1AILL6
SKETCH MAP OF OPERATIONS PRECEDING THE BATTLE
PART II
THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE
ACTION
IT was, as we have seen, on the evening of
Tuesday, September the 13th, that the
Black Prince with his 7000 men and his
heavy train of booty had marched into
La Haye des Cartes, a small town upon the
right bank of the Creuse, somewhat above
the place where that river falls into the
Vienne.
His confidence that his well -mounted
and light-armed troops could outmarch his
pursuers was not yet shaken ; he was even
prepared to imagine that he had already
shaken them off ; but anyone who could have
taken a general survey of all that country-
side would have discovered how ill-founded
was his belief. The great forces of the
French king, coming down slantways from
the north and east, had had nearly four miles
to march to his three. Yet they were gaining
33 3
34 POITIERS
on him. Edward had given the French king
a day's advance by his hesitation before
Tours, and the tardiness with which he had
received news of John's crossing the Loire
was another point in favour of the French.
It was the Black Prince's business to get
down on to the great road which has been
the trunk road of Western France for two
thousand years, and which leads from Paris
through Chatellerault and Poitiers to Angou-
leme, and so to Bordeaux. If (as he hoped)
he could advance so quickly as to get rid
of the pursuit, so much the better. If he
were still pressed he must continue his
rapid marching, but, at any rate, that was
the road he must take.
To the simple plan, however, of reaching
Chatellerault and then merely following
the great road on through Poitiers, he must
make a local exception, for Poitiers itself
contained a large population, with plenty
of trained men, munitions, and arms ; and
it was further, from its position as well as
from its walls, altogether too strong a place
for him to think of taking it.
The town had been from immemorial
time a fortress : first tribal (and the rallying
point of the Gaulish Picts under the name
of Limon) ; later, Roman and Frankish.
The traveller notes to-day its singular
PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION 35
strength, standing on the flat top and sides
of its precipitous peninsula, isolated from
its plateau on every side save where a narrow
neck joins it to the higher land ; it is im-
pregnable to mere assault, half surrounded
by the Clain to the east, and on the west
protected by a deep and formidable ravine.
It was absolutely necessary for the Prince
not only to avoid Poitiers, but not to pass
so close to it as to give the alarm. What
he proposed to do, therefore, was to strike
the great Bordeaux road at a point well
south of the city, called Les Roches, and to
do this he must engage himself within the
broadening triangle which lies between the
Clain and the Vienne : these rivers join their
waters just above Chatellerault itself.
The main road from Chatellerault to
Poitiers runs on the further side of the Clain
from this triangle, and the Black Prince,
by engaging himself in the wedge between
the rivers, would thus have a stream between
his column and the natural marching route
of any force which might approach him
from the fortified city which he feared.
Further, he was well provided for part of
this march through the triangle between the
rivers by the existence of a straight way
formed by the old Roman road which runs
through it, and may still be followed. He
36 POITIERS
could not pursue this road all the way to
Poitiers (which town it ultimately reaches
by a bridge over the Clain), but some-
where half-way between Chatellerault and
Poitiers he would diverge from it towards
the east, and so avoid the latter stronghold
and make a straight line for Les Roches.
This it would be the easier for him to do
because the soil in that countryside is light
and firm and traversed by very numerous
cross-lanes which serve its equally numerous
farms. Only one considerable obstacle in-
terrupts a passage southward through the
triangle between the rivers. It is the
forest of Mouliere. But the Black Prince's
march along the Roman road would skirt
this wood to the west, and by the time his
approach to Poitiers compelled him to
diverge from the Roman road eastward,
the boundary of the forest also sloped
eastward away from it.
His first day's march upon this last lap,
as it were, of his escape was a long one.
By the road he took it was no less than
fifteen miles, and at the end of it he
gathered his column into Chatellerault, a
couple of miles from the place where the
Clain and the Vienne meet, and where the
triangle between the two streams through
which he proposed to retreat begins. At
PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION 37
the same hour that the Black Prince was
bringing his men into Chatellerault, John
was leading the head of his column into
La Haye. He was just one day's march
behind the Plantagenet.
There followed an unsoldierly and un-
characteristic blunder on the part of the
Black Prince which determined all the
strange cross-purposes of that week.
The Black Prince having made Chatel-
lerault, believed that he had shaken off the
pursuit.
In explanation of this error, it must be
remembered that the population so far
north as this was universally hostile to the
southern cause and to the claim of the
Plant agenets. Whether news of the ravag-
ing and burning to the eastward had
affected these peasants or no, we are
certain that they would give the Anglo -
Gascon force nothing but misleading infor-
mation. The scouting, a perpetual weak-
ness in mediaeval warfare, was imperfect ;
and even had it been better organised, to
scout rearwards is not the same thing as
scouting on an advance or on the flanks.
At any rate, he took it for granted that
there was no further need for haste, that
he had outmarched the French king, and
that the remainder of the retreat might be
38 POITIERS
taken at his own pleasure. It must further
be noted that there was a frailty in the
Black Prince's leading which was more
than once discovered in his various cam-
paigns, and which he only retrieved by his
admirable tactical sense whenever he was
compelled to a decision. This frailty con-
sisted, as might be guessed of so headstrong
a rider, in trying to get too much out of
his troops in a forced march, and paying for
it upon the morrow of such efforts by
expensive delays which more than counter-
balanced its value. He relied too much
upon the very large proportion of mounted
men which formed the bulk of his small
force. He forgot the limitations of his few
foot-soldiers and the strain that a too -rapid
advance put upon his heavy and cumber-
some train of waggons, laden with a heavier
and heavier booty as his raid proceeded.
He stayed in Chatellerault recruiting the
strength of his mounts and men for two
whole days. He passed the Thursday and
the Friday there without moving, and it
was not until the Saturday morning that
he set out from the town, crossed the
Clain, and engaged himself within the tri-
angle between the two rivers.
The land through which he marched upon
that Saturday morning had been the scene
PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION 39
of a much more famous and more decisive
feat of arms ; for it was there, just north of
the forest of Mouliere, that Charles Martel
six hundred years before had overthrown
the Mahommedans and saved Europe for
ever.
So he went forward under the morning,
making south in a retreat which he believed
to be unthreatened.
Meanwhile, John, at the head of the
French army, was pursuing a better -
thought-out strategical plan, whose com-
plexity has only puzzled historians because
they have not weighed all the factors of
the military situation.
We do not know what numbers the King
of France disposed of during this, the first
part of the pursuit, but we must presume
that he could not yet risk an engagement.
The town of Poitiers was everything to
him. There he would find provisions and
munition, some considerable body of trained
men, and the possibility of levying many
thousands more. It was a secure rallying
point upon which to block the Black Prince's
march to the south, or from which to sally
out and intercept his march. But when
John found himself in La Haye upon
Wednesday the 14th, a day's march behind
Edward's command, he could not take
40 POITIERS
the direct line for Poitiers because that very
command intercepted him. He knew that
it had taken the road for Chatellerault.
He determined, therefore, by an exception-
ally rapid progress, to march round his
enemy by the east, to get down to
Chauvigny, and from that point to turn
westward and reach Poitiers. It was a
risk, but it was the only course open to
him. Had the Black Prince pursued his
march instead of waiting at Chatellerault,
John's plan would have failed, prompt as
its execution was ; but the Black Prince's
delay gave him his opportunity.
From La Haye to Chauvigny by the cross-
roads that lead directly southward is a
matter of thirty miles. John covered this
in two days. Leaving La Haye upon the
morning of Thursday the 15th, he brought
his force into Chauvigny upon the 16th,
Friday. He left, no doubt, a certain
proportion delayed upon the road, but he
himself, with the bulk of the army, com-
pleted the distance.
While, therefore, the Black Prince was
delaying all that Thursday and Friday in
Chatellerault, John was passing right in
front and beyond him some eight miles to
the eastward ; and on the Saturday, the
17th, while the Black Prince was leading
PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION 41
his column through the triangle between
the rivers, John was marching due west
from Chauvigny to Poitiers by the great
road through St Julien, yet another fifteen
miles and more, in the third day of his great
effort. The head of the column, with the
king himself, we must presume to have
ridden through the gate of Poitiers before
or about noon, but the last contingents
were spread out along the road behind him
when, in that same morning or early after-
noon of Saturday, the outriders of the
Anglo-Gascon force appeared upon the fields
to the north.
It was an encounter as sudden as it was
dramatic. The countryside at this point
consists in wide, open fields, the plough-
lands of a plateau which rises about one
hundred feet above the level of the rivers.
To the east of this open country a line of
wood marks the outlying fragments of the
forest of Mouliere ; to the west, five miles
away, and out of sight of these farms,
stands upon its slope above the Clain the
town of Poitiers. The lane by which the
Black Prince was advancing was that
which passes through the hamlet of Le
Breuil. 1 It is possible that he intended to
1 Le Breuil Mingot, not Le Breuil 1'Abbesse, which.
lies south upon the Chauvigny road.
42 POITIERS
camp there ; he had covered sixteen miles.
But if that was his intention, the accident
which followed changed it altogether. A
mile beyond the village there is a roll of
rising land, itself a mile short of the great
road which joins Poitiers and Chauvigny.
It was from this slight eminence that
scouts riding out in front of Edward's army
saw, massed upon that road and advancing
westward across their view, a considerable
body of vehicles escorted by armed men.
It was the rearguard and the train of
King John.
A man following to-day that great road
between Poitiers and Chauvigny eastward,
notes a spinney and a farm lying respec-
tively to the right and to the left of his
way, some four kilometres from the gate
of Poitiers, and not quite three from the
famous megalith of the " Lifted Stone,"
which is a matter of immemorial reverence
for the townsfolk. That farm is known
as La Chaboterie, and it marks the spot
upon the high road where John's rear-
guard first caught sight of Edward's scouts
upon the sky-line to the north.
The mounted men of this force turned
northward off the high road, and pursued
the scouts to the main body near Le Breuil ;
then a sharp skirmish ensued, and the
PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION 43
French were driven off. This melee was
the first news the Black Prince had that
the French army, so far from having
abandoned the pursuit, had marched right
round him, and that his column was
actually in the gravest peril. It warned
him that though he had already covered
those sixteen miles, he must press on further
before he could dare to camp for the night.
His column was already weary, but there
was no alternative.
The army reached the high road, and
crossed it long after the French rearguard
had disappeared to the west. Exhausted
as it was, it pushed on another mile or two
southward by the lanes that lead across the
fields to the neighbourhood of Mignaloux,
and there it camped. The men had covered
that day close on twenty miles ! But before
settling for the evening, the Black Prince
sent out the Captal de Buch north-westward
over the rolling plateau in reconnaissance.
When this commander and his body reached
the heights which overlook the Clain, and
faced the houses of Poitiers upon the hill
beyond, they saw in the valley beneath
them, and on the slopes of the river bank,
the encampment of the French army ; and
reported, upon their return, " that all the
plain was covered with men-at-arms."
44 POITIERS
Upon the next morning, that of Sunday
the 18th of September, broken as the force
was with fatigue, it was marshalled again
for the march but no more than a mile
or two was asked of it.
Edward had scouted forward upon the
morning, and discovered, just in front of
the little town of Nouaille and to the north-
ward of the wood that covers that little
town, a position which, if it were necessary
to stand, would give him the opportunity
for a defensive action.
That he intended any such action we may
doubt in the light of what followed. It
was certainly not to his advantage to do so.
The French by occupying Poitiers had left
his way to the south free, but the extreme
weariness of his force and the possibility
that the French might strike suddenly were
both present in his mind. He wisely pre-
pared for either alternative of action or
retreat, and carefully prepared the position
he had chosen. For its exact nature, I
must refer my reader to the next section,
but the general conditions of the place are
proper to the interest of our present matter.
The main business, it must be remembered,
upon which the Prince's mind was concen-
trated was still his escape to the south.
He must expect the French advance upon
PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION 45
him to come down by the shortest road to
any position he had prepared, even if he
did not intend, or only half intended, to
stand there : and that position was there-
fore fixed astraddle of the road which leads
from Poitiers to Nouaille.
Now, just behind that is, to the south
of this position runs in a tortuous course
through a fairly sharp l little valley a stream
called the Miosson. It formed a sufficient
obstacle to check pursuit for some appreci-
able time. There was only one bridge
across it, at Nouaille itself, which he could
destroy when his army had passed ; and
the line of it was strengthened by woods
upon either side of the stream.
The Black Prince, therefore, must be
judged (if we collate all the evidence) to
have looked forward to a general plan
offering him two alternatives.
Either the French would advance at once
and press him. In which case he would be
compelled to take his chance of an action
against what were by this time far superior
numbers ; and in that case he had a good
prepared position, which will shortly be de-
scribed, upon which to meet them.
Or they would give him time to file away
1 The tops of the steep banks are nearly a hundred
feet above the water.
46 POITIERS
southward, in which case the neighbouring
Miosson, with its ravine and its woods,
would immediately, at the very beginning
of the march, put an obstacle between him
and his pursuer ; especially as he had two
crossings, a ford, and a bridge some way
above it, and he could cut the bridge the
moment he had crossed it.
Finally, if (as was possible) a combination
of these two alternatives should present
itself, he had but to depend upon his
prepared position for its rearguard to hold
during just the time that would permit
the main force to make the passage of the
Miosson, not two miles away.
With this plan clearly developed he
advanced upon the Sunday morning no
more than a mile or two to the position
in question, fortified it after the fashion
which I shall later describe, and camped
immediately behind it to see what that
Sunday might bring. He could not make
off at once, because his horses and his march-
ing men were worn out with the fatigue of
the previous day's great march.
PART III
THE TERRAIN
THE defensive position taken up by Edward,
the Black Prince, upon Sunday the 18th
of September 1356, and used by him in
the decisive action of the following day, is
composed of very simple elements ; which
are essentially a shallow dip (about thirty
feet only in depth), bounded by two slight
parallel slopes, the one of which the Anglo-
Gascon force held against the advance of
the King of France's cosmopolitan troops
from the other.
We can include all the business of that
Monday's battle in a parallelogram lying
true to the points of the compass, and
measuring three miles and six furlongs
from north to south, by exactly two and a
half miles from oast to west ; while the
actual fighting is confined to an inner
parallelogram no more than two thousand
yards from east to west, by three thousand
47
48 POITIERS
from north to south. The first of these areas
is that given upon the coloured map which
forms the frontispiece of this little book.
The second is marked by a black frame
within that coloured map, the main features
of which are reproduced in line upon a larger
scale on the page opposite this.
I have said that the essentials of the
Black Prince's defensive plan were :
(1) A prepared defensive position, which
it might or might not be necessary to hold,
coupled with
(2) an obstacle, the Miosson River,
which (when he should retreat) he could
count upon to check pursuit ; especially
as its little valley was (a) fairly deeply cut,
(b) encumbered by wood, and (c) passable
for troops only at the bridge of Nouaille,
which he was free to cut when it had served
him, and at a somewhat hidden ford which
I will later describe.
I must here interpose the comment that
the bridge of Nouaille, being of stone, would
not have been destroyable during a very
active and pressed retreat under the con-
ditions of those times ; that is, without the
use of high explosives. But it must be
remembered that such a narrow passage
would in any case check the pursuit, that
half an hour's work would suffice to make
HEIGHTS IN MGL
FE-ET ABOVE THE 5
AND CONTOU
15 FEET APAR
98f
50 POITIERS
a breach in the roadway, and perhaps to
get rid of the keystones, that a few planks
thrown over the gap so formed would be
enough to permit archers defending the
rear to cross over, that these planks could
then be immediately withdrawn, and that
the crush of a hurried pursuit, which would
certainly be of heavily armed and mounted
knights, would be badly stopped by a gap
of the kind. I therefore take it for granted
that the bridge of Nouaille was a capital
point in Edward's plan. 1
The line along which the Black Prince
threw up entrenchments was the head of
the slight slope upon the Nouaille or eastern
side of the depression I have mentioned.
It ran from the farm Maupertuis (now
called La Cardinerie) to the site of those
out-buildings which surround the modern
steadings of Les Bordes, and to-day bear
the name of La Dolerie. The length of that
line was, almost to a foot, one thousand
English yards, and it will easily be perceived
that even with his small force only a portion
of his men were necessary to hold it. Its
strength and weakness I shall discuss in a
moment. This line faces not quite due
west, indeed nearly twenty degrees north of
1 There are to-day three bridges, but in the fourteenth
century only one existed, the central one.
THE TERRAIN 51
west. 1 Its distance as the crow flies from
the Watergate of Poitiers is just under seven
kilometres, or, as nearly as possible, four
miles and six hundred and fifty English
yards. 2 While its bearings from the town
of Poitiers, or the central part thereof, is
a trifle south of due south-east. 3
The line thus taken up, and the depression
in front of it, are both singularly straight,
and the slope before the entrenchments,
like its counterpart opposite, is regular,
increasing in depth as the depression pro-
ceeds down towards the Miosson, which,
at this point, makes a bend upward to meet,
as it were, the little valley. A trifle to the
south of the centre of the line there is a
break in the uniformity of the ridge, which
comes in the shape of a little dip now
occupied by some tile- works ; and on the
further, or French, side a corresponding
and rather larger cleft faces it ; so that the
whole depression has the shape of a long
cross with short arms rather nearer its base
1 "Facing north-east," Fortescue, History of the
British Army, vol. i. p. 39. I mention this con-
siderable error for the purposes of correction : Mr
Fortescue's history being rightly regarded as the
standard text-book of English military history.
2 "Some fifteen miles,* Fortescue, ibid. "Seven
miles," Oman, History of Art of War, etc. Always use
a map when you write about battles.
3 " South-west," Fortescue, ibid., p. 38.
52 POITIERS
than its summit. Just at the end of the
depression, before the ground sinks abruptly
down to the river, the soil is marshy.
Leading towards this position from
Poitiers there was and is but one road, a
winding country lane, now in good repair,
but until modern times of a poor surface,
and never forming one of the great high
roads. The importance of this unique road
will be seen in a moment.
There had once existed, five hundred
yards from the right of the Black Prince's
entrenched line, a Roman road, the traces
of which can still be discovered at various
parts of its course, but which, even by the
time of Poitiers, had disappeared as a
passable way. The only approach remain-
ing, as I have said, was that irregular
lane which formed the connection between
Poitiers and Nouaille.
Now in most terrains where feudal cavalry
was concerned, the existence or non-exist-
ence of a road, and its character, would
be of little moment in the immediate
neighbourhood of the action : for though
a feudal army depended (as all armies
always must) upon roads for its strategics,
it was almost independent of them in
its tactics upon those open fields which
were characteristic of mediaeval agriculture.
THE TERRAIN 63
The mounted and armoured men deployed
and charged across the stubble. Those
who have read the essay upon the Terrain
of Crecy, which preceded this in the present
series, will appreciate that the absence of a
road uniting the English and French posi-
tions in that battle was of no significance to
the result.
But in the particular case of Poitiers
this road, and a certain cart-track leading
off it, must be carefully noted, because
between them they determine all that
happened ; and the reason of this is that
the front of the English position was
covered with vines.
The French method of cultivating the
vine, and the condition of that cultivation
in the middle of September (in all but a
quite exceptionally early year so far north
as Poitou), makes of a vineyard the
most complete natural obstacle conceivable
against the use of cavalry, and at the
same time a most formidable entanglement
to the advance of infantry, and a tolerable
cover for missile weapons at short range.
The vine is cultivated in France upon
short stakes of varying height with varying
districts, but usually in this neighbourhood
somewhat over four feet above the ground ;
that is, covering most of a man's figure, even
54 POITIERS
as he would stand to arms with a long-bow,
yet affording space above for the discharge
of the weapon. These stakes are set at
such distances apart as allow ordered and
careful movement between them, but close
enough together to break and interfere
with a pressed advance : their distances
being determined by the f ulness of the plant
before the grapes are gathered, a harvest
which falls in that region somewhat later
than the date of the action.
Wherever a belt of vineyard is found,
cultivated after this fashion, the public
ways through it are the only opportunities
for advance ; for land is so valuable under
the grape that various allotments or pro-
perties are cultivated to their outermost
limit. The vineyards (which have now
disappeared, but which then stood upon
the battlefield) could only be pierced by
the roads I have mentioned. 1
This line, then, already well protected
by the vineyards, was further strengthened
by the presence of a hedge which bounded
them and ran along their eastern edge
upon the flat land above the depression.
1 It may be presumed upon the analogy of surround-
ing vineyards though it is not certain that the culti-
vation of the vine would cease on the lower slope (since
that inclined away from the sun), and was thickest upon
the summit of the ridge.
THE TERRAIN 55
I have mentioned a cart-track, which
branched off on the main lane, and which
is marked upon my map with the letters
' ' A-A." It formed, alongside with the lane,
a second approach through the English
line, and it must be noticed that, like the
main lane, a portion of it, where it breasted
the slope, was sunk in those times below
the level of the land on either side.
The first thought that will strike the
modern student of such a position is that
a larger force, such as the one commanded
by the King of France, should have been
able easily to turn the defensive upon its
right.
Now, first, a feudal army rarely manoeu-
vred. For that matter, the situation was
such that if John had avoided a fight
altogether, and had merely marched down
the great south-western road to block Prince
Edward's retreat, the move would have
had a more complete effect than winning a
pitched battle. The reader has also heard
how the Black Prince's sense of his peril
was such that he had been prepared to treat
upon any but the most shameful terms.
It is evident, therefore, that if the French
fought at all it was because they wanted to
fight, and that they approached the con-
flict in the spirit (which was that of all
56 POITIERS
their time) disdainful of manoeuvring and
bound in honour to a frontal attack. A
modern force as superior in numbers as was
John's to the Black Prince's would have
" held " the front of the defensive with
one portion of its effectives, while another
portion marched round that defensive's
right flank. But it is impossible to estab-
lish a comparison between developed
tactics and the absolutely simple plan of
feudal warfare. It is equally impossible
to compare a modern force with a feudal
force of that date. It had not the unity
of command and the elasticity of organ-
isation which are necessary to divided and
synchronous action. It had no method of
attack but to push forward successive bodies
of men in the hope that the weight of the
column would tell.
Secondly, Edward defended that right
flank from attack by establishing there his
park of waggons.
None the less, the Black Prince could not
fail to see the obvious danger of the open
right upon the plateau beyond the Roman
road ; even in the absence of any manoeu-
vring, the mere superior length of the
French line might suffice to envelop him
there. It was presumably upon this account
that he stationed a small body of horse
THE TERRAIN 57
upon that slightly higher piece of land, five
hundred yards behind Maupertuis and a
little to the right of it, which is now the
site of the railway station ; and this mounted
force which he kept in reserve was to prove
an excellent point of observation during
the battle. It was the view over towards
the French position obtained from it which
led, as will be seen in the next section, to the
flank charge of the Captal de Buch.
There remains to be considered such
environments of the position as would
affect the results of the battle. I have
already spoken of the obstacle of the
Miosson, of Nouaille, of the passages of the
river, and of the woods which would further
check a pursuit if the pressure following
upon a partial defeat, or upon a determina-
tion to retire without accepting action,
should prove serious. I must now speak
of these in a little more detail.
The depression, which was the main
feature of the battlefield, is carved like
its fellows out of a general and very level
plateau of a height some four hundred to
four hundred and fifty feet above the sea.
This formation is so even that all the higher
rolls of the land are within ten or twenty
feet of the same height. They are, further,
about one hundred feet, or a little more,
58 POITIERS
higher than the water level of the local
streams. This tableland, and particularly
the ravine of the Miosson, nourishes a
number of woods. One such wood, not more
than a mile long by perhaps a quarter broad,
covers Nouaille, and intervenes between
that town and the battlefield. On the
other side of the Miosson there is a con-
tinuous belt of wood five miles long, with
only one gap through it, which gap is
used by the road leading from Nouaille
to Roches and to the great south-western
road to Bordeaux.
In other words, the Black Prince had
prepared his position just in front of a
screen of further defensible woodland.
I have mentioned one last element in the
tactical situation of which I have spoken,
and which needs careful consideration.
Over and above the passage of the
Miosson by a regular bridge and a proper
road at Nouaille, the water is fordable in
ordinary weather at a spot corresponding
to the gap between the woods, and called
"Man's Ford" or " Le Gue d'Homme."
Now, of the several accounts of the action,
one, the Latin chronicler Baker, mentions
the ford, while another, the rhymed French
story of the Chandos Herald, speaks of
Edward's having begun to retire, and of
THE TERRAIN 59
part of his forces having already crossed the
river before contact took place. I will deal
later with this version ; but in connection
with the ford and whether Edward either
did or intended to cross by it, it is worthy
of remark that the only suggestion of his
actually having crossed it, and of his in-
tention to do so in any case, is to be found
in the rhymed chronicle of the Chandos
Herald ; and the question arises what re-
liance should be placed on that document ?
It is evident on the face of it that the
detail of the retreat was not invented.
Everyone is agreed that the rhymed
chronicle of the Chandos Herald does not
carry the same authority as prose contem-
porary work. It is not meant to. It is a
literary effort rather than a record. But
there would be no reason for inventing such
a point as the beginning of a retreat before
an action not a very glorious or dramatic
proceeding and the mere mention of such
a local feature as the ford in Baker is clear
proof that what we can put together from
the two accounts is based upon an historical
event and the memory of witnesses.
On the other hand, the road proper
ran through Nouaille, and when you are
cumbered with a number of heavy -wheeled
vehicles, to avoid a road and a regular bridge
60 POITIERS
and to take a bye-track across fields down
a steep bank and through, water would seem
a very singular proceeding. Further, this
track would lose all the advantages which
the wood of Nouaille gave against pursuit,
and, finally, would mean the use of a passage
that could not be cut, rather than one that
could.
Again, we know that the Black Prince
when he was preparing the position on
Sunday morning, covered its left flank,
exactly as his father had done at Crecy ten
years before, with what the Tudors called
a " leaguer," or park of waggons.
Further, we have a discrepancy between
the story of this retreat by the ford and the
known order of battle arranged the day
before. In that order of battle he put in
the first line, just behind his archers, who
lined the hedge bounding the vineyards, a
group of men-at-arms under Warwick and
Oxford. He himself commanded the body
just behind these, and the third or rearmost
line was under the command of Salisbury
and Suffolk.
How are these contemporary and yet
contradictory accounts to be reconciled ?
What was the real meaning of movement
on the ford ?
I beg the reader to pay a very particular
THE TERRAIN 61
attention to the mechanical detail which I
am here examining, because it is by criticism
such as this that the truth is established in
military history between vague and appar-
ently inconsistent accounts.
If you are in command of a force such as
that indicated upon the following plan, in
which A and B together form your front
Direction from cokick attack is expected
. A * 6
line, C your second, and D your third, all
three facing in the direction of the arrow,
and expecting an attack from that direction ;
and if, after having drawn up your men so,
you decide there is to be no attack, and
determine to retreat in the direction of X,
62 POITIERS
your most natural plan will be to file off
down the line towards X, first with your
column D, to be followed by your column
C, with A and B bringing up the rear. And
this would be all the more consonant with
your position, from the fact that the very
men A and B, whom you had picked out
as best suited to take the first shock of an
action, had an action occurred, would also
in the retreat form your rearguard, and be
ready to fight pursuers should a pursuit de-
velop and press you. That is quite clear.
Now, if, for reasons of internal organ-
isation or what not, you desired to
keep your vanguard still your vanguard
in retreat, as it was on the field, your
middle body still your middle body
on the march, and what was your rear-
guard on the field still your rearguard in
the long column whereby you would leave
that field, the manoeuvre by which you
would maintain this order would be filing
off by the left ; that is, ordering A to form
fours and turn from a line into a column,
facing towards the point E, and, having
done so, to march off in the direction of X.
You would order B to act in the same
fashion next. When A and B had got clear
of you and had reached, say, F, you would
make C form fours and follow after ; and
THE TERRAIN 63
when C had marched away so far as to
leave things clear for D, the last remaining
line, you would make D in its turn form
fours and close up the column.
Now, suppose the Black Prince had been
certain on that Monday morning that there
would be no attack, nor even any pursuit.
Suppose that he were so absolutely certain
as to let him dispense with a rearguard
then he might have drawn off in the second
of the two fashions I have mentioned.
Warwick and Oxford (A and B) would have
gone first, C (the Black Prince, in the centre)
would have gone next, and Salisbury, D,
would have closed the line of the retreat.
This would have been the slowest method he
could have chosen for getting off the field,
it would have had no local tactical advantage
whatsoever, and to adopt such a method
in a hurried departure at dawn from the
neighbourhood of a larger force with whom
one had been treating for capitulation the
day before, would be a singular waste of
time in any case. But, at any rate, it would
be physically possible.
What is quite impossible is that such a
conversion and retirement should have been
attempted ; for we know that a strong rear-
guard was left, and held the entrenchments
continuously.
64 POITIERS
To leave the field in the second fashion
I have described is mathematically equiva-
lent to breaking up your rearguard and ceas-
ing to maintain it for the covering of your
retreat. It is possible only if you do not
intend to have a rearguard at all to cover
your retirement, because you think you do
not need it. As a fact, we know that all
during the movement, whatever it was, a
great body of troops remained on the field
not moving, and watching the direction from
which the French might attack. So even
if there was a beginning of retirement, a
strong rearguard was maintained to cover
that movement. We further know that
the Black Prince and the man who may be
called chief of his staff, Chandos, planned
to keep that very strong force in position in
any case, until the retirement (if retirement
it were) was completed ; and we further
know that the fight began with a very stout
and completely successful resistance by
what must have been a large body posted
along the ridge, and what even the one
account which speaks of the retirement de-
scribes as the bulk of the army.
To believe, then, that Warwick filed off
by the left, followed by the vehicles, and
then by the main command under the
Prince, and that all this larger part of the
THE TERRAIN 65
army, including its wheeled vehicles, had got
across the ford before contact took place
and an action developed, is impossible. It
is not only opposed to any sound judgment,
it is mathematically impossible. It also
conflicts with the use of a park of vehicles
to defend the left of the entrenched line,
and with the natural use of the line of retreat
by Nouaille. I can only conclude that what
really happened was something of this sort :
Edward intended to retreat if he were
left unmolested. He intended to retreat
through Nouaille and by its bridge, but for
safety and to disencumber the road he sent
the more valuable of the loot-waggons by
the short cut over the ford.
The Prince had got the bulk of his force
standing on the entrenched position upon
that Monday morning, and bidden it wait
and see whether the enemy would attempt
to force them or no. As there was no sign
of the enemy's approach from the north-
west, and as he was not even watched by any
scout of the enemy's, he next put Salisbury
in command of the main force along the
hedge, put Warwick and Oxford at the head
of a strong escort for leading off the more
valuable of the booty which would pre-
sumably be in few waggons and began to
get these waggons away down the hill to-
5
66 POITIERS
wards the ford. They would thus be taking
a short cut to join the road between Nouaille
and Roches later on, and they would relieve
the congestion upon the main road of
retreat through Nouaille. It is possible
that the Black Prince oversaw this opera-
tion himself upon the dawn of that day,
involving, as it did, the negotiation of a
steep bank with cumbersome vehicles, and
those vehicles carrying the more precious
and portable loot of his raid. This would
give rise to the memory of his having
crossed the stream. But, meanwhile, the
mass of army was still standing where it
was posted, prepared for retreat on the
bridge of Nouaille if it were not
molested, or for action if it were. Just
as this minor detachment of the more
valuable vehicles, with its escort, had
got across the water, messengers told
Edward that there were signs of a French
advance. He at once came back, counter-
manded all provisional orders for the
retirement, and recalled the escort, save
perhaps some small party to watch the
waggons which had got beyond the river.
Thus, returning immediately, Edward was
ready to instruct and fight the action
in the fashion described in all the other
accounts.
THE TERRAIN 67
This, I think, is the rational reconciliation
of several stories which are only in apparent
contradiction, and which are rather con-
fusing than antagonistic.
PART IV
THE ACTION
THOUGH the accounts of the Battle of
Poitiers, both contemporary with and subse-
quent to it, show, like most mediaeval chron-
icling, considerable discrepancies, it is pos-
sible by comparing the various accounts and
carefully studying the ground to present
a collected picture of that victory.
The reader, then, must first seize the posi-
tion, character, and numbers of Edward's
force as it lay upon the early morning of
Monday the 19th of September.
Three considerable bodies of men arranged
in dense formation, faced west by a little
north upon the level which intervenes
between the modern farm of Cardinerie
and the wood of Nouaille. These three
bodies of men stood armed, one rank behind
the other, and all three parallel. The first
was commanded by Salisbury. It was
drawn up along the hedge that bounded
68
THE ACTION 69
the vineyards, and it stretched upon either
side of the lane which led and leads from
Poitiers to Nouaille. With Salisbury was
Suffolk ; and this first line, thus facing the
hedge, the depression, and the fields beyond,
from whence a French attack might de-
velop, was certainly the largest of the three
lines. The reader must conceive of the
road astraddle of which this command of
Salisbury's and Suffolk's stood as lying flush
with the fields around, until the edge of the
depression was reached, and there forming
for some yards a sunken road between the
vines that stood on either side of it. The
reader should also remember that further
to the left, and covered by the last exten-
sion of this line of men, was the second
diverging lane, crossing through vineyards
precisely as did the other, and sunk as the
other was sunk for some yards at the crest
of the little depression. It is this lane
which now passes by the tile-works and
leads later to the ford over the river in
the valley beyond. The line thus holding
the hedge, and commanded by Suffolk and
Salisbury, contained the greater number
of the archers, and also a large proportion
of men-at-arms, dismounted, and ready to
repel any French attack, should such an
attack develop in the course of the morn-
70 POITIERS
ing to interfere with the retirement which
Edward had planned ; but as yet, in the
neighbourhood of six o'clock, there was no
sign of the enemy in the empty fields upon
the west beyond the depression. The King
of France's camp was more than two miles
away, and it looked as though Edward
would be able to get his whole force beyond
the river without molestation.
So much for what we will call the first
line, for the position of which, as for that
of its fellows, I must beg the reader to refer
to the coloured map forming the fronti-
spiece of this book.
Immediately behind the first line so drawn
up came a second line, under the command
of Warwick and Oxford, but it was a much
smaller body, because it had a very different
task to perform. Its business was to act
as an escort for certain of the waggon-loads
which Edward, both on account of their
value and of the difficulty of getting them
up and down the banks of the steep ravine
of the river behind them, had determined
to send forward at the head of his retirement.
This escort, then, we may call the second
line. Before the retiring movement began it
stood parallel to and immediately in the
rear of the first line.
The third line was a somewhat larger
THE ACTION 71
command, principally of Gascon men-at-
arms under the direct leadership of the
Black Prince himself.
To this picture of the three lines standing
one behind the other and facing away from
the sunrise of that Monday morning, we
must add a great body of waggons, parked
together, upon the right of the first line and
defending it from any turning movement
that might be attempted upon that flank,
should a French advance develop after all.
We must suppose some few of the more
valuable waggon-loads, carrying the best
booty of the raid, to have been put last in
this park, so that their drivers should have
the opportunity of filing off first when the
middle or second line, which was to be their
escort, began the retirement. Further, we
must remark teams harnessed and drivers
mounted in front of those special waggons,
while the mass of the wheeled vehicles still
lay closely packed together for the purposes
of defence against a possible attack, their
teams standing to the rear, ready to harness
up only when the retirement was in full
swing, and to come last in the retreating
column, saving perhaps for a small rear-
guard that might be left to watch the
extremity of the line after everyone else
had got safely off the field. We must see
72 POITIERS
the Black Prince's command, such of it as
was mounted, all on horseback already,
and the men-at-arms of the second line or
escort under Warwick similarly in the saddle;
but the first line, which formed the bulk of
the whole force, we must picture to ourselves
all on foot, the mounted men as well as the
small proportion of foot-sergeants : for if there
should be occasion to repel some attack
developing during the retirement, it was in
the essence of the Plantagenet tactics to dis-
mount the men-at-arms during the defensive,
and to hold a position entirely on foot.
I have said that no sign of the enemy
appeared upon the empty fields to the west
beyond the depression while these dis-
positions were being made ; and, when all
was ready, perhaps between seven and eight
o'clock, the order for the first movement of
the retirement was given. Warwick and
the escort he commanded turned from line
to column and began to file off by the left,
down towards the ford. The special waggons,
whose safety was thus being first anxiously
provided for, followed, and the whole of
the second line thus got clear of the space
between the first and the third. It marched
south towards the river, with its little
body of wheeled vehicles following up its
mounted men.
THE ACTION 73
When the second line had thus got clear
of the original formation, Edward, pre-
ceded by his banner and accompanied by
a certain number of men from the third
line (how many we cannot tell, but pre-
sumably no great force), rode off over the
fields to the left of Warwick's string of
cavalry and waggons, to superintend the
difficult passage of the Miosson. He left
behind him, standing to arms at the hedge,
the whole of the strong first line under
Salisbury and Suffolk, and the bulk of his
own third line marshalled in parallel behind
this first line.
At this moment, then, somewhere be-
tween seven and eight o'clock, the situation
is thus : the Prince and the band with
him are riding off towards the edge where
the land falls somewhat steeply towards the
Miosson. He and his men have their backs
turned to the bulk of the army, which, in
two bodies, the larger one lining the hedge
and a smaller one behind it, are holding
the chosen defensive position in case there
should be any sign of a French pursuit.
We must presume that if no such pursuit
appeared to be developing it was Edward's
intention, when he had got the special
waggons and their escort safely across the
ford, to withdraw the bulk of his force thus
74 POITIERS
left behind by the road through Nouaille
and across its bridge. The smaller body
would go first ; then, section by section, the
first line would fall into column and retire
by the Nouaille road, leaving at last no
more than a small rearguard at the hedge,
which, when all the waggons of the park
had been harnessed up and were filing down
the Nouaille road, would itself fall into
column and bring up the extreme end of
the retreat.
By this plan the valuable waggon-loads
with their escort, which had crossed at the
ford under Warwick, would be joined in, say,
an hour or an hour and a half by the bulk
of the army, which would have rejoined by
the Nouaille road, and the junction would
be effected at the spot where, at the bottom
of the frontispiece-map, the dotted line
passing the ford reaches the main road.
Well before noon the whole command, with
its heavy and cumbersome train of wheeled
vehicles, would be on the heights there
called Le Bouilleau and would be approach-
ing in safety, with the obstacle of the Miosson
behind them, the great south-western road
to Bordeaux, along which the rest of the
retreat would take place.
This plan would have every advantage,
always supposing that there was no French
THE ACTION 75
pursuit, or that that pursuit should develop
too late to interfere with the Black Prince's
scheme. The more valuable of the booty
would have been got clean away by a side
track which was also a short cut, and
which would put it, when the whole retire-
ment was effected, ahead of the column, that
is upon the safe side of the force, furthest
from an enemy's attack. It would have got
away early without suggesting to the enemy
the line of its escape or the opportunity of
using the ford. The retirement of the mass
of the army by the Nouaille road would lead
the pursuit, if any, along that road and
towards the bridge, the cutting of which
after the Anglo-Gascon force had passed
would leave that force with the obstacle
of the river between it and its enemy.
As it happened, a French pursuit did
develop, and, luckily for the Black Prince,
it developed within a very few minutes of
his setting off to superintend Warwick's
passage of the ford. Had it come an hour
later, when the mass of the force was in
column of route and making for Nouaille,
he might have had to record not a triumph
but a disaster.
The French camp was, as I have said,
rather more than two miles away from the
defensive position of Maupertuis. It lay
76 POITIERS
on all that open land which now forms the
fields of La Miletrie farm and lies to the
south-west of that steading, between the
great Lussac road and that country road
to Nouaille along which the march of the
French army had proceeded, and across
which, further along, the Black Prince's
command lay astraddle.
King John had no accurate knowledge
of his enemy's dispositions. In spite of
the coming and going of the day before, he
still knew no more than the fact that some-
where two or three miles ahead down the
road, and between him and Nouaille, the
Black Prince's force was gathered. He
appears to have made no effort to grasp
things in greater detail upon that Monday
morning, and when he marshalled his host
and set out, it was with the intention
(which he pursued) of merely going forward
until he found the enemy, and then attack-
ing. The host was arranged in four bodies ;
three main " battles " or lines, comparable
to the English three lines it was the
universal formation of a mediaeval army
were brought up in column for the advance,
to deploy when the field should be reached.
The first was commanded by the heir to
the throne, the Dauphin, Charles, Duke
of Normandy ; the second by the Duke of
THE ACTION 77
Orleans, the king's brother ; the third was
commanded by the king himself, and was
the largest of the three.
The attempt to estimate the numbers
which John could bring against his enemy
as he set out on that Monday morning is
beset with difficulties, but must nevertheless
be made.
Froissart, with his quite unreliable and
(let us be thankful) romantic pen, speaks of
over 40,000. That is nonsense. But it is
not without some value, because, like so
many of Froissart's statements, it mirrors
the tradition of the conflict which future
years developed. If we had no other
figures than Froissart's we should not
accept them, but we should accept, and
rightly, an impression of great superiority
in numbers on the part of the attack.
On the other hand, we have the evidence
of a man who wrote from the field itself, and
who wrote from the English side Burg-
hersh. If anything, he would exaggerate, of
course ; but he was a soldier (and Froissart
was at the other psychological pole !). He
actually wrote from the spot, and he thought
that everything mounted in front of him
came to about 8000, to which he added 3000
men upon foot. Now, Burghersh may have
been, and probably was, concerned to men-
78 POITIERS
tion no more than what he regarded as
fighting units worth mentioning : infantry
more or less trained and properly accoutred
men-at-arms. For these latter, and their
number of 8000, we have plenty of
independent testimony, and especially
Baker's. Baker gives the same number.
As regards the trained infantry, we know
that John had 2000 men armed with the
arbalest (a mechanical cross-bow worked
with a ratchet), and we know that he
also had, besides these cross-bowmen, a
number of trained mercenaries armed with
javelins.
We may set inferior and exterior limits
to the numbers somewhat as follows :
the French host included 8000 fully-armed
mounted men ; that is, not quite double the
Gascon and English units of the same rank
and equipment. It had somewhat less than
the English contingent of missile-armed
soldiers, and these armed with a weapon
inferior to their opponents. Count these
two factors at 10,000 against the Anglo-
Gascon 7000 or 8000. There you have an
inferior limit which was certainly exceeded,
for John's command included a number of
other rougher mounted levies and other
less trained or untrained infantry. Above
that minimum we may add anything we
THE ACTION 79
like up to 10,000 for the untrained, and we
get a superior limit for the total of 20,000
men all told. Averaging the probabilities
from the various accounts, we are fairly safe
in setting this addition at 5000, and per-
haps a little over. So that the whole force
which John could have brought into the
field, and which, had it been properly led
and organised, he might have used to full
effect in that field, was about double the
numbers which the Black Prince could
oppose to him. The Anglo -Gascons, stand-
ing on the defensive, had from 7000 to
8000 men, and the force marching against
them on the offensive was presumably in
the neighbourhood of 15,000 to 16,000 ;
while an analysis of the armament gives
you, in the capital factors of it, an inferior
number of French missile weapons to the
missile weapons of the English prince,
but double the number of fully-armed
knights.
As a fact, the organisation of the two
sides offered a more striking contrast than
the contrast in their numbers. The Planta-
genet force worked together and was one
well-handled command. The Valois force
was in separate commands, so little cohesive
that one of them, as we shall see, abandoned
the struggle without orders. For the other
80 POITIERS
causes of the defeat I must ask the reader
to wait until we come to the actual en-
gagement.
To the three " battles " thus marshalled
and advancing along the road, John added
a special vanguard, the constitution of
which must be carefully noted. It was
sent forward under the two marshals,
Audrehen and Clermont. They commanded :
first, 300 fully-armoured and mounted
men-at-arms, who rode at the head ;
next, and following immediately behind
these, certain German auxiliaries, also
mounted, in what precise numbers we do
not know, but few ; thirdly, 2000 spear-
men on foot, and with them the whole
2000 cross-bowmen using the only missile
weapons at John's disposal.
It will be seen that something like a
third of John's whole force, and nearly half
the trained part, was thus detached to
form the vanguard in front of the three
marching columns. Its function and mis-
hap we shall gather when we come to the
contact between them and Edward's force.
Meanwhile, we must conceive of the French
army as breaking camp some time between
six and seven o'clock of the Monday,
forming in three columns upon the Nouaille
road, with the king commanding the largest
THE ACTION 81
rear column, his brother, the Duke of
Orleans, the column immediately in front,
and the King's son and heir, the Duke of
Normandy, in front of Orleans ; while
ahead of all these three columns marched
the 4000 or 5000 men of the vanguard
under the marshals, with their 300 picked
knights leading the whole.
It must have been at about eight o'clock
that the men thus riding with the marshals
in front of the French advance came up the
slight slope near La Moudurerie, topped the
hill, and saw, six or seven hundred yards in
front of them, beyond the little depression,
the vineyards and the hedge behind the
vineyards, and behind that hedge again the
massed first line of the Black Prince's force.
Off in the rear to the right they could see the
Black Prince's banner, making away down
towards the river, and soon dropping out
of sight behind the shoulder of the hill.
The special waggons of booty, with Warwick
and their escort, must already have dis-
appeared when the French thus had their
first glimpse of the enemy.
The sight of the Black Prince's banner
disappearing down into the valley on the
right rear, rightly decided the French
vanguard that their enemy had determined
upon a retreat, and had actually begun it.
6
82 POITIERS
The force in front of them, behind the hedge,
large as it was, they rightly conceived to be
the rearguard left to protect that retreat.
They determined to attack at once ; and
the nature of the attack, which had care-
fully been planned beforehand under the
advice of Douglas, the Scotchman who was
fighting on King John's side, and who had
experience of the new Plantagenet tactics,
must next be grasped.
The experience and the memory of Crecy
ten years before had left with the Valois a
clear though very general idea that the
novel and overwhelming superiority of the
English long-bow could not be met by the
old-fashioned dense feudal cavalry charge.
Any attempt to attack the front of a line
sufficiently defended by long - bowmen in
this fashion meant disaster, many horses
would be shot long before their riders could
come within lance thrust, the dense packed
line of feudal knights, thousands in number,
would be thrown into confusion by the
maddened and fallen animals, the weight
of the remainder as they pressed forward
would only add to that confusion, and the
first " battle," delivering the regular tradi-
tional first-charge with which every old
feudal battle had opened, would in a few
minutes degenerate into a wild obstacle of
THE ACTION 83
welter and carnage stretched in front of
the defensive line, and preventing anything
behind them from coming up.
It was to avoid misfortune of this kind
that the vanguard of which I have spoken
was formed. Its orders were these :
The picked three hundred knights of that
vanguard were to ride straight at the
English archers, and almost certainly to
sacrifice themselves in so doing. But as
their numbers were few, their fall would
not obstruct what was to follow. It was
their business in this immolation of their
bodies to make it possible for the mass of
infantry, especially those armed with missile
weapons, to come close in behind and tackle
the English line. That infantry, aided by
the mounted German mercenaries and
meeting missile with missile by getting
hand to hand with the English bowmen
at last, would prevent those English bow-
men from effective action against the next
phase of the offensive. This next phase
was to be the advance of the first " battle,"
that of the Dauphin, the Duke of Normandy.
His men-at-arms were to go forward dis-
mounted, and to close with the whole
English line while its most dangerous
portion, the bowmen, were still hampered
by the close pressure of the vanguard.
84 POITIERS
The plan thus ordered by the French
king at the advice of his Scotch lieutenant
was not so incompetent as the results have
led some historians to judge. It suffered
from four misconceptions ; but of these one
was not the fault of the French commander,
while the other three could only have been
avoided by a thorough knowledge of the
new Plantagenet tactics, which had not yet
been grasped in the entirety of their
consequences even by those who had
invented them.
The four misconceptions were :
(1) The idea that the attack would only
have to meet the force immediately in front
of it, behind the hedge. This was a capital
error, for, as we shall see, Warwick with his
men escorting the waggons came back in
time to take a decisive part in the first phase
of the action. But it was not an error
which anyone on the French side could
have foreseen ; Warwick's men having dis-
appeared down the slope of the hill towards
the ford before the French vanguard caught
its first sight of the enemy.
(2) The underrating of the obstacle
afforded by the vineyard in front of the
English line, and the consequent " bunch-
ing " of the attack on to the lane which
traversed that vineyard. Probably the
THE ACTION 85
archers themselves did not know what an
extraordinarily lucky accidental defence
the vineyard provided for their special
weapon. It was exactly suited to giving
them the maximum effect of arrow-fire
compatible with the maximum hindrance
to an advancing enemy.
(3) The French king and his advisers
had not yet grasped nor did anyone in
Europe for some time to come the remark-
able superiority of the long - bow over
the cross-bow. Just so modern Europe,
and particularly modern Prussia, with all
its minute observation and record, failed
for ten good years to understand that rate
of delivery and not range is what turns
the scale with modern artillery. The cross-
bow shot an uglier missile, inflicted a nastier
wound, was more feared by the man in
danger of that wound than the long-bow
was. In range the two weapons might be
regarded as nearly equal, save for this
deciding difference, that the trained long-
bowman could always count upon his
maximum range, whereas the cross-bow
varied, as a machine always will, with
conditions independent of the human will
behind it. You could not extend its pull
to suit a damp string, for instance, and if
your ratchet caught, or your trigger jammed,
86 POITIERS
the complicated thing held you up ; but
delivery from the long-bow was, from the
hands of the strong and trained man, the
simplest and most calculable of shots,
variable to every condition of the moment.
Its elasticity of aim was far superior, and,
most important of all, its rate of fire was
something like three to one of the arbalest.
(4) Douglas and the French king rightly
decided that horses were so vulnerable to
the long-bow as to prevent a mounted
charge from having a chance of success,
if it were undertaken in a great mass.
They decided, upon that account, to dis-
mount their men-at-arms, and to attack on
foot. But what they did not allow for was
the effect of the new armour upon foot
tactics of that kind. It was one thing for
a line holding the defensive, and not
compelled to any forward movement, to
dismount its armoured knights and bid them
await an attack. It was quite another thing
for such armoured knights to have to make
a forward movement of half a mile or more
on foot, and to engage with the sword
or the shortened lance at the end of it.
Armour was at that moment in transition.
To the old suit of chain mail, itself quite
ponderous enough to burden a man on foot,
there had been added in that generation
THE ACTION 87
plate in various forms. Everyone had
plate armour at least upon the elbows,
knees, and shoulders, many had it upon all
the front of the legs and all the front of the
arms, some had adopted it as a complete
covering ; and to go on foot thus loaded over
open fields for the matter of eight hundred
yards was to be exhausted before contact
came. But of this men could not judge so
early in the development of the new tactics.
They saw that if they were to attack the
bowmen successfully they must do so on
foot, and they had not appreciated how
ill-suited the armoured man of the time was
for an unmounted offensive, however well
he might serve in a defensive " wall."
These four misconceptions between them
determined all that was to follow.
It was a little before nine when the
vanguard of the Valois advanced across
the depression and began to approach the
slight slope up towards the vineyards and
the hedge beyond. In that vineyard, upon
either side of the hollow road, stood, in the
same " harrow " formation as at Crecy, the
English long-bowmen.
The picked three hundred knights under
the two French marshals spurred and
charged. Small as their number was, it
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was crowded for the road into which the
stakes of the vineyard inevitably shepherded
them as they galloped forward, and, strug-
gling to press on in that sunken way, either
side of their little column was exposed to
the first violent discharge of arrows from
the vines. They were nearly all shot down,
but that little force, whose task it had been,
after all, to sacrifice their lives in making
a way for their fellows, had permitted the
rest of the vanguard to come to close
quarters. The entanglement of the vine-
yard, the unexpected and overwhelming
superiority of the long-bow over the cross-
bow, the superior numbers of the English
archers over their enemies' arbalests, made
the attack a slow one, but it was pressed
home. The trained infantry of the van-
guard, the German mounted mercenaries,
swarmed up the little slope. The front
of them was already at the hedge, and was
engaged in a furious hand to hand with
the line defending it, the mass of the re-
mainder were advancing up the rise, when
a new turn was given to the affair by the
unexpected arrival of Warwick.
The waggons which that commander
had been escorting had been got safely
across the Miosson ; the Black Prince had
overlooked their safe crossing, when there
THE ACTION 89
came news from the plateau above that the
French had appeared, and that the main
force which the Black Prince had left behind
him was engaged. Edward rode back at
once, and joined his own particular line,
which we saw just before the battle to
be drawn up immediately behind the
first line which guarded the hedge and
the vineyard. Warwick, with excellent
promptitude, did not make for Salisbury
and Suffolk to reinforce their struggling
thousands with his men, but took the
shorter and more useful course of moving
by his own left to the southern extremity
of his comrade's fiercely pressed line (see
frontispiece near the word " Hedge " ; the
curved red arrow lines indicate the return
of Warwick).
He came out over the edge of the hill,
just before the mass of the French van-
guard had got home, and when only the
front of it had reached the hedge and was
beginning the hand-to-hand struggle. He
put such archers as he had had with his
escort somewhat in front of the line of the
hedge, and with their fire unexpectedly and
immediately enfiladed all that mass of the
French infantry, which expected no danger
from such a quarter, and was pressing for-
ward through the vineyards to the summit
90 POITIERS
of the little rise. This sharp and unlocked
for flank fire turned the scale. The whole
French vanguard was thrown into confusion,
and broke down the side of the depression
and up its opposing slope. As it so broke
it interfered with and in part confused the
first of the great French " battles," that
under the Dauphin, whose ordered task it
was to follow up the vanguard and rein-
force its pressure upon the English line.
Though the vanguard had been broken,
the Dauphin's big, unwieldy body of dis-
mounted armoured men managed to go
forward through the shaken and flying
infantry, and in their turn to attack the
hedge and the vineyard before it. Against
them, the flank fire from Warwick could
do less than it had done against the un-
armoured cross-bowmen and sergeants of
the vanguard which it had just routed.
The Dauphin's cumbered and mailed
knights did manage to reach the main
English position of the hedge, bujb they
were not numerous enough for the effort
then demanded of them. The half mile of
advance under such a weight of iron had
terribly exhausted them, and meanwhile
Edward had come back, the full weight of
his command every man of it except a
reserve of four hundred was massed to
THE ACTION 91
meet the Dauphin's attack. Warwick's
men hurried up from the left to help in the
sword play, and by the time the melee was
engaged that line of hedge saw the unusual
struggle of a defensive superior in numbers
against an inferior offensive which should,
by all military rule, have refused to attempt
the assault.
Nevertheless, that assault was pressed
with astonishing vigour, and it was that
passage in the action, before and after the
hour of ten o'clock, which was the hottest of
all. Regarded as an isolated episode in the
fight, the Dauphin's unequal struggle was
one of the finest feats of arms in all the
Hundred Years' War. Nothing but a
miracle could have made it succeed, nor did
it succeed ; after a slaughter in which the
English defending line had itself suffered
heavily and the Dauphin's attack had been
virtually cut to pieces, there followed a
third phase in the battle which quite can-
celled not only the advantage (for that was
slight) but also the glory gained by the
Dauphin's great effort.
Next behind the Dauphin's line, the
second " battle," that of the Duke of
Orleans, should have proceeded to press on
in reinforcement and to have launched
yet another wave of men against the hedge
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which had been with such difficulty held.
Had it done so, the battle would have been
decided against Edward. The Dauphin's
force, though it was now broken and the
remnants of it were scattering back across
the depression, had hit the Anglo-Gascon
corps very hard indeed. Edward had lost
heavily, his missile weapon was hampered
and for the moment useless, many of his
men were occupied in an attempt to save the
wounded, or in seeking fresh arms from the
train to replace those which had been broken
or lost in the struggle. What seems to have
struck most those who were present at
the action upon the English side was the
exhaustion from which their men were
suffering just after the Dauphin's unsuccess-
ful attempt to pierce the line. If Orleans
had come up then, he could have determined
the day. But Orleans failed to come into
action at all, and the whole of his " battle,"
the second, was thrown away.
What exactly happened it is exceedingly
difficult to infer from the short and con-
fused accounts that have reached us. It is
certain that the whole of Orleans' command
left the field without actually coming into
contact with the enemy. The incident
left a profound impression upon the legend
and traditions of the French masses, and
THE ACTION 93
was a basis of that angry contempt which
so violently swelled the coming revolt of
the populace against the declining claims
of the feudal nobility. It may almost be
said that the French monarchy would not
have conquered that nobility with the aid
of the French peasantry and townsmen
had not the knights of the second " battle "
fled from the field of Poitiers.
What seems to have happened was this.
The remnant of the Dauphin's force, falling
back in confusion down the slight slope,
mixed into and disarrayed the advancing
" battle " of Orleans. These, again, were
apparently not all of them, nor most of
them, dismounted as they should have been,
and, in any case, their horses were near at
hand. The ebb tide of the Dauphin's
retirement may have destroyed the loose
organisation and discipline of that feudal
force, must have stampeded some horses,
probably left dismounted knights in peril
of losing their chargers, and filled them
with the first instinct of the feudal soldier,
which was to mount. We may well believe
that to all this scrimmage of men backing
from a broken attack, men mounting in
defiance of the unfamiliar and unpopular
orders which had put them on foot, here
riderless horses breaking through the ranks,
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there knots of men stampeded, the whole
body was borne back, first in confusion,
afterwards in flight. So slight are the
inequalities of the ground, that anyone
watching from the midst of that crest
could have made nothing of the battle to
the eastward, save that it was a surging
mass of the French king's men defeated,
and followed (it might erroneously have
been thought) by the Black Prince and his
victorious men.
At any rate, the whole of the second
" battle," mixed with the debris of the first,
broke from the field and rode off, scattered
to the north. It is upon Orleans himself
that the chief blame must fall. Whatever
error, confusion, stampede, or even panic
had destroyed the ordering of his line,
it was his business to rally his men and
bring them back. Whether from personal
cowardice, from inaptitude for command,
or from political calculation, Orleans failed
in his duty, and his failure determined
the action.
The pause which necessarily followed the
withdrawal of the central French force, or
second " battle," under Orleans gave
Edward's army the breathing space they
needed. It further meant, counting the
destruction of the vanguard and the cutting
THE ACTION 95
to pieces of the Dauphin's " battle," the
permanent inferiority through the rest of
the day of anything that the French king
could bring against the Plantagenets. The
battle was lost from that moment, between
ten and eleven o'clock, when Orleans'
confused column, pouring, jostled off the
field, left the great gap open between King
John and the lead of his third battle and
the English force.
Had strict military rule commanded the
feudal spirit (which it never did), John
would have accepted defeat. To have
ridden off with what was still intact of his
force, to wit, his own command, the third
" battle," would have been personally
shameful to him as a knight, but politically
far less disastrous than the consequences
of the chivalrous resolve he now made.
He had left, to make one supreme effort,
perhaps five, perhaps six thousand men.
Archers wherewith to meet the enemy's
archers he had none. What number of
fully- armoured men-at-arms he had with
him we cannot tell, but, at any rate, enough
in his judgment to make the attempt upon
which he had decided. The rest of the
large force that was with him was of less
considerable military value ; but, on the
other hand, he could calculate not unjustly
96 POITIERS
upon the fact that all his men were fresh,
and that he was leading them against a
body that had struggled for two hours
against two fierce assaults, and one that
has but just emerged unbroken, it is true
from a particularly severe hand-to-hand
fight.
John, then, determined to advance and,
if possible, with this last reserve to carry
the position. It was dismounted, as he had
ordered and wished all his men-at-arms to
be, and the King of France led this last
body of knights eastward across the little
dip of land. As that large, fresh body of
mailed men approached the edge of the
depression on its further side, there were
those in the Black Prince's force who
began to doubt the issue. A picturesque
story remains to us of Edward's over-
hearing a despairing phrase, and casting at
its author the retort that he had lied damn-
ably if he so blasphemed as to say the Black
Prince could be conquered alive.
I have mentioned some pages back that
reserve of four hundred fully - equipped
men-at-arms which Edward had detached
from his own body and had set about four
hundred yards off, surrounding his standard.
The exact spot where this reserve took up
its position is marked to-day by the railway
THE ACTION 97
station. It overlooks (if anything can be
said to " overlook " in that flat stretch)
the field. It is some twelve or fifteen feet
higher than the hedge at which, a couple of
furlongs away, the long defence had held its
own throughout that morning. The Black
Prince recalled them to the main body.
Having done so, he formed into one closely
ordered force all the now mixed men of the
three lines who were still able to go forward.
John was coming on with his armoured
knights on foot, their horses almost a mile
away (he was bringing those men, embar-
rassed and weighted by their metal under
the growing heat of the day, nearly double
the distance which his son's men had found
too much for them) . Edward bade his men-
at-arms mount, and his archers mounted
too. It will be remembered that six men
out of seven were mounted originally for
the raid through Aquitaine. The fighting
on foot had spared the horses. They were
all available. And the teams and sumpter
animals were available as well in so far as
he had need of them. John's men, just
coming up on foot to the opposite edge of
the little dip, saw the low foot line of the
Anglo-Gascons turning at a word of com-
mand into a high mounted line. But before
that mounted line moved forward, Edward
7
98 POITIERS
had a last command to give. He called for
the Captal of Buch, a Gascon captain not
to be despised.
This man had done many things in the
six weeks' course of the raid. He was a
cavalry leader, great not only with his own
talent, but with the political cause which
he served, for of those lords under the
Pyrenees he was the most resolute for the
Plant agenets and against the Valois. The
order Edward gave him was this : to take
a little force all mounted, to make a long
circuit, skirting round to the north and
hiding its progress behind the spinneys and
scrub -wood until he should get to the rear
of the last French reserve that was coming
forward, and when he had completed the
circuit, to display his banner and come down
upon them unexpectedly from behind. It
was an exceedingly small detachment which
was picked out for this service, not two
hundred men all told. Rather more than
half of them archers, the rest of them fully-
equipped men-at-arms. Small as was this
tiny contingent which the Black Prince
could barely spare, it proved in the event
sufficient.
That order given, the Black Prince sum-
moned his standard-bearer an Englishman
whose name should be remembered, Wood-
THE ACTION 99
land set him, with the great banner which
the French had seen three hours before
disappearing into the river valley when
Edward had been off watching the passage
of the ford, at the head of the massed
mounted force, and ordered the charge.
The six thousand horse galloped against
the dismounted armoured men of John down
the little slope. The shock between these
riders and those foot-men came in the hollow
of the depression. The foot-men stood the
charge. In the first few minutes gaps were
torn into and through the French body by
a discharge of the last arrows, and then
came the furious encounter with dagger
and sword which ended the Battle of
Poitiers. It was the mounted men that
had the better of the whole. The struggle
was very fierce and very bewildered, a mass
of hand - to - hand fighting in individual
groups that swayed, as yet undetermined,
backwards and forwards in the hollow.
But those who struck from horseback had
still the better of the blows, until, when this
violence had continued, not yet determined,
for perhaps half an hour, the less ordered and
less armoured men who were the confused
rearmost of John's corps heard a shout
behind them, and looking back saw, bearing
down upon them, the banner of St George,
100 POITIERS
which was borne before the Captal, and
his archers and his men-at-arms charging
with the lance. Small as was the force of
that charge, it came unexpectedly from
the rear, and produced that impression of out-
flanking and surrounding which most de-
moralises fighting men. The rear ranks
who pressed just behind the place where the
heaviest of the struggle was proceeding,
and where John's knights on foot were
attempting to hold their own against the
mounted Gascons and English, broke away.
The Captal' s charge drove home, and the
remnant of the French force, with the king
himself in the midst of it, found themselves
fighting against a ring which pressed them
from all sides.
King John had with him his little son
Philip, a boy of fourteen, later most pro-
perly to be called " The Bold." And this
lad fought side by side with his father,
calling to the king : " Father, guard to the
right ! Father, guard to the left ! " as the
lance-thrusts and the sword-strokes pressed
them. The lessening and lessening group
of French lords that could still hold their
own in the contracting circle was doomed,
and the battle was accomplished.
Scattering across those fields to the west
and northward bodies of the Plantagenet's
THE ACTION 101
men galloped, riding down the fugitives, kill-
ing, or capturing for ransom, the wounded.
And Edward, his work now done, rode back
to the old position, rested, sent messengers
out to recall the pursuers (some of whom
had pressed stragglers for four miles), and
watched his men gathering and returning.
He saw advancing towards him a clam-
orous crowd, all in a hubbub around some
centre of great interest for them, and slowly
making eastward to where the banner of
the Black Prince was now fixed. He sent to
ask what this might be, and was told that
it was the King of France who had been
taken prisoner at last, and for whom
various captors were disputing. John,
pressed by so many rivals, had given up his
sword to one of Edward's knights. That
knight was a man from the Artois, who had
said to the Valois, his lawful king, " Sir, I
am serving against you, for I have lost my
land, and, owing no allegiance, therefore, I
became the man of the King of England."
Edward received his great captive, and
that was the end of the Battle of Poitiers.
It was noon when the fight was decided.
It was mid-afternoon when the last of the
pursuers had been called back into the
English camp.
PART V
THE ASPECT OF THESE
BATTLES
IN closing the coupled and twin stories of
Crecy and Poitiers it is not without advan-
tage to describe the aspect which they
would have presented to an onlooker of
their time ; and in doing this I must not
only describe the general armament of
Western European men in the middle of the
fourteenth century, but that contrast be-
tween weapons and methods which gave
the Plantagenets for more than a genera-
tion so permanent an advantage over their
opponents.
You would have seen a force such as that
of the Black Prince or of King John camped
before a battle, a white town of tents cross-
ing the fields, with here and there a vivid
patch of colour where some great leader's
pavilion was of blue or red and gold. The
billeting of men upon householders was a
102
ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES 103
necessary feature of a long march, or of the
occupation of a town. But when there
was question of occupying a position, or
when an army was too large to lodge under
roof, it depended upon canvas. But it
must be remembered that not the whole
of a force by any means enjoyed that
advantage ; a large portion, especially in a
considerable body, was often compelled to
bivouac.
Further, the reader must represent to
himself a heavier impediment of vehicles
than a corresponding force would burden
itself with to-day : a far heavier impedi-
ment than a quite modern army would
think tolerable. There were no aids what-
soever to progress, save those which the
armed body carried with it. No command-
eering of horses upon any considerable scale ;
no mechanical traffic, of course ; and, save
under special circumstances where water
carriage could relieve the congestion, no
chances of carrying one's booty (then a
principal concern), one's munitions, and
one's supplies, save in waggons.
On the other hand, the enormous supply
of ammunition which modern missile war-
fare demands, and has demanded more or
less for three hundred years, was absent.
There was no reserve of food ; an army lived
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not entirely off the country, for it always
began with a reserve of provisions, but
without any calculated reserve for a whole
campaign, and necessarily in such times
without any power of keeping essential
nourishment for more than a few days.
Say that your fourteenth-century corps
was more burdened upon the march by far,
but by far less dependent upon its base than
a modern force, and you have the truth.
You must therefore conceive of the
marching body, be it 7000 or be it 30,000
or more, as a long column of which quite
one-half the length will usually consist of
waggons.
The first thing that would strike the
modern observer of such a column would be
the large proportion of mounted men.
Even the Plantagenets, who first, by an
accident about to be described, discovered,
and who by their genius for command
developed, a revolution in missile weapons,
marched at the head of columns which were,
not only for their spirit and their tradition
and command, but for all their important
fighting units, mounted.
Tradition and the memory of a society
are all-important in these things. From the
beginning of the Dark Ages until well on
into the Middle Ages, say, from the end
ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES 105
of the fifth century to the beginning of
the fourteenth, a battle was essentially a
mounted charge ; and the noble class which
for generation after generation had learnt
and gloried in the trade of those charges
was the class which organised and enjoyed
the peril of warfare.
The armoured man was always an expen-
sive unit. His full equipment was the year's
rent of a farm, and what we should to-day
call a large country estate never produced
half a dozen of him, and sometimes no more
than one. He needed at least one servant.
That was a mere physical necessity of his
equipment. Often he had not one, but two
or three or even four. He and his assist-
ants formed the normal cell, so to speak,
of a fourteenth-century force. And on the
march you would have seen the thousands
of these " men-at-arms " (the term is a
translation of the French " gensdarmes,"
which means armed people) surrounded or
followed by a cloud of their followers.
Now their followers were more numerous
than they, and yet far more vulnerable, and
they form a very difficult problem in the
estimation of a fourteenth- century force.
When I say, as I have said with regard
both to Crecy and to Poitiers though it is
truer of Crecy than of Poitiers that the
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number of combatants whom contempo-
raries recognised as such was far less than
the total numbers of a force, I was point-
ing out that, by our method of reckoning
numbers, it would be foolish to count
Edward III.'s army in 1346 as only 24,000,
or the Black Prince's ten years later as only
7000. The actual number of males upon
the march who had to be fed and could be
seen standing upon the field was far larger.
But, on the other hand, the value for fight-
ing purposes of what I may call the domes-
tics was very varied. Some of those who
served the wealthiest of the men-at-arms
were themselves gentry. They were youths
who would later be fully armed themselves.
They rode. They had a sword ; they could
not be denied combat. Even their inferiors
were of value in a defensive position, how-
ever useless for offensive purposes. When we
hear of A making a stand against B though
B was "three times as strong" as A, we
must remember that this means only that
the counting combating units on B's side
were three times A's. If A was holding a
defensive position against B, B would only
attack with his actual fighting units, whereas
A could present a dense mass of humanity
much more than a third of B, certainly
two-thirds of B, and sometimes the equal
ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES 107
of B, to resist him, though only one-third
should be properly armed. While, on the
other hand, if B should fail in the attack
and break, the number of those cut down
and captured in the pursuit by the victorious
A would be very much greater than the
fighting units which B had brought against
A at the beginning of the combat. All the
followers and domestics of A's army would
be involved in the catastrophe, and that is
what accounts for the enormous numbers
of casualties which one gets after any
decisive overthrow of one party by the
other, especially of a large force against a
small one. It is this feature which accounts
for the almost legendary figures following
Crecy and Poitiers.
The gentry, who were the nucleus of the
fighting, were armed in the middle of the
fourteenth century after a fashion transi-
tional between the rings of mail which had
been customary for a century and the plate
armour which was usual for the last cen-
tury before the general use of firearms,
ornamental during the century in which
firearms established themselves, and is
still the popular though false conception
of mediaeval accoutrement. From imme-
morial time until the First Crusade and the
generation of the Battle of Hastings and the
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capture of Jerusalem, fighters had covered
their upper bodies with leather coats, and
their heads with an iron casque. From at
least the Roman centuries throughout the
Dark Ages, a universal use of metal rings
linked together over the leather protected
the armed man, and our word mail is French
for links, and nothing else. In time, the
network of links came to be used separate
from the leather, and so it was put on like
a shirt of flexible iron all through the great
business which saved Europe during the
ninth century against the Northmen in Gaul
and Britain, against the Moor in Spain. It
was the armour of the knights in Palestine,
of the native armies which drove the
Germans from Italy, and of the Norman
Conquest.
But with the end of the thirteenth
century, which for simplicity and virile
strength was the flower of our civilisation,
armour, with many another feature of life,
took on complexity and declined. Men
risked less (the lance also came in to frighten
them more). The bascinet, which had
protected the head but not the face (with
later a hinged face-piece attached), was
covered or replaced by a helmet protecting
head and face and all. At the knees,
shoulders, elbows, jointed plates of iron
ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES 109
appeared. Scales of iron defended the shin
and the thigh, sometimes the lower arm as
well. The wealthier lords covered the front
of every limb with plates of this sort, and
there was jointed iron upon their hands.
The plain spur had rowels attached to it ; the
sword shortened, so did the shield; a dagger
was added to the sword-belt upon the
right-hand side.
We must further see in the picture of a
fourteenth-century battle great blazonry.
The divorce of the gentry from the
common people (one of the fatal eddies of
the time) developed in the wealthy this
love of colour, and in their dependants the
appetite for watching it. Of heraldry I say
nothing, for it has nothing to do with the
art or history of soldiers. But banners
were a real part of tactics and of instructions.
By banners men had begun to align them-
selves, and by the display of banners to
recognise the advent of reinforcement or
the action at some distant point (distant as
fields were then reckoned) of enemies or of
friends. Colour was so lively a feature of
those fields that shields, even the horses'
armour, cloths hung from trumpets, coats,
all shone with it.
Now to the feudal cavalry with their
domestics, to the gentry so armed whose
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tradition was the soul and whose numbers
the nucleus of a fourteenth-century army,
one must add, quite separate from their
domestics and squires, the foot-soldiers; and
these were trained and untrained.
At this point a capital distinction
must be made. Armies defending a whole
countryside, notably the French armies
defending French territory during the
Hundred Years' War, levied, swept up, or
got as volunteers masses of untrained
men. Expeditions abroad had none such :
they had no use for them. Edward had
none at Crecy and his son had none at
Poitiers ; and what was true of these two
Plantagenet raids was true of every organised
expedition made with small numbers from
one centre to a distant spot, throughout the
Middle Ages. It is important to remember
this, for it accounts for much of the great
discrepancies in numbers always observ-
able between an expeditionary force and its
opponents, as it does for the superior
excellence of the raiding tens against the
raided hundreds.
But if we consider only the trained force
of foot-men in an army of the fourteenth
century, we discover that contrast between
the Plantagenet and the Valois equip-
ment with which I desire to conclude.
ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES 111
England had developed the long-bow. It
is a point which has been vastly over-
emphasised, but which it would be un-
scholarly and uncritical to pass over in
silence. A missile weapon had been pro-
duced and perfected by the Welsh, the art
of it had spread over the west country ; and
it was to prove itself of value superior to
any other missile weapon in the field
throughout the fourteenth and even into
the early fifteenth centuries. Outside these
islands it was imperfectly understood as
a weapon, and its lesson but imperfectly
learnt. When it was replaced by firearms,
the British Islands and their population
dropped out of the running in land arma-
ment for two hundred years. The long-bow
was not sufficiently superior to other weapons
to impress itself dramatically and at once
upon the consciousness of Europe. It re-
mained special, local, national, but, if men
could only have known it, a decisive element
of superiority up to the breakdown of the
Plantagenet tradition of government and of
Plantagenet society.
I have described in the writing of Crecy
how superior was its rate of delivery always,
and often its range, to other missile weapons
of the time. We must also remember that
capital factor in warfare, lost with the
112 POITIERS
Romans, recovered with the Middle Ages,
which may be called the instruction of
infantry.
The strength of an armed body consists
in its cohesion. When the whole body is in
peril, each individual member of it wants to
get away. To prevent him from getting
away is the whole object of discipline and
military training. Each standing firm (or
falling where he stands) preserves the unity,
and therefore the efficacy, of the whole.
A few yielding at the critical point (and
the critical point is usually also the point
where men most desire to yield) destroy
the efficacy of nine times their number.
Now, one of the things that frighten an
individual man on foot most is another
man galloping at him upon a horse. If
many men gallop upon him so bunched
on many horses, the effect is, to say the
least of it, striking. If any one doubts
this, let him try. If the men upon the
horses are armed with a weapon that can
get at the men on foot some feet ahead
(such as is the lance), the threat is more
efficacious still, and no single man (save
here and there a fellow full of some religion)
will meet it.
But against this truth there is another
truth to be set, which the individual man
ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES 113
would never guess, and which is none the
less experimentally certain which is this :
that if a certain number of men on foot
stand firm when horses are galloping at
them, the horses will swerve or balk before
contact ; in general, the mounted line will
not be efficacious against the dismounted.
There is here a contrast between the nerves
of horses and the intelligence of men, as
also between the rider's desire that his horse
should go forward and the horse's training,
which teaches him that not only his rider,
but men in general, are his masters. What
is true here of horses is not true of dogs,
who think all men not their masters, but
their enemies, and desire to kill them, and
what is more, can do so, which a horse can-
not. A charge of large mounted dogs
against unshaken infantry would succeed.
A charge of mounted horses against un-
shaken infantry, if that infantry be suffi-
ciently dense, will fail.
To teach infantry that they can thus
withstand cavalry, instruction is the in-
strument. You must drill them, and form
them constantly, and hammer it into them
by repeated statement that if they stand
firm all will be well. This has been done
in the case of men on foot armed only with
staves. It is easier, of course, to inculcate
8
114 POITIERS
the lesson when they are possessed of
missile weapons ; for a continued discharge
of these is impossible from charging riders,
and an infantry force armed with missile
weapons, and unshaken, can be easily
persuaded by training, and still more by
experience, that it can resist cavalry.
Under modern conditions, where missile
weapons are of long range and accurate,
this goes without saying ; but even with a
range of from fifty to eighty yards of a
missile that will bring down a horse or
stop him, infantry can easily be made
sufficiently confident if it is unshaken.
Now, to shake it, there is nothing available
(or was nothing before the art of flying was
developed) save other men, equally station-
ary, armed with other missiles. The long-
bowman of the Plantagenets knew that he
had a missile weapon superior to anything
that his enemy could bring against him.
He therefore stood upon the defensive
against a feudal cavalry charge unshaken,
and he was trained by his experience and
instruction to know that if he kept his line
unbroken, the cavalry charge would never
get home. That is the supreme tactical
factor of the Plantagenet successes of the
Hundred Years' War.
PART VI
THE RESULTS OF THE BATTLE
THE immediate results of the victory of
Poitiers consisted, first, in the immensely
increased prestige which it gave to the
House of Plantagenet throughout Europe.
Next, we must reckon the local, though
ephemeral, effect upon the opinion of
Aquitaine, through which the Black Prince
was now free to retreat at his ease towards
Bordeaux and the secure territories of
Gascony.
But though these results were the most
immediate, and though the victory of one
monarch over the other was the most
salient aspect of the victory for contem-
poraries, as it is for us, there was another
element which we must particularly con-
sider because it illustrates the difference
between the political conditions of the
fourteenth century and of our own time.
The real point of the success was the
115
116 POITIERS
capture of the king's person. The impor-
tance of the action lay, of course, to some
extent, in the prestige it gave to the Black
Prince personally; though that point was
lost a very few years afterwards in the sub-
sequent decline of the Plantagenet power
in the south. In so far as an action in
those days could carry a national effect
that is, could be regarded by distant civilian
populations as proof of strength or weakness
in contrasting races and societies Poitiers
had not even the claim of Crecy ; for it was
not principally an archers' but a knights'
battle, and the knights were mainly the
gentry of the South of France, while those
who had been broken by the only cavalry
movement of the engagement were not
even French knights, but levies of German,
Spanish, and other origin. But the capture
of the King of France at that particular
moment of chivalry, that last fermentation
of a feudal society which was reaching its
term, had a vast positive effect, as well as
an almost incalculable moral effect.
There is nothing in modern times to
which such an accident can be accurately
paralleled. Perhaps the capture of the
capital city would be the nearest thing ;
but there is this grave difference between
them, that the capture of the modern
RESULTS OF THE BATTLE 117
capital must mean prolonged and decisive
success in war, whereas the capture of John
was an accident of the field. The victory
would have been less by far if the whole of
the king's command had fled, with the king
himself at the head of the rout.
A modern parallel more nearly exact
would be the transference in the midst of
a conflict of some great financial power from
one side to the other ; or again, in a naval
war, the blowing up of so many capital
ships by contact mines as would put one
of the two opposing fleets into a hopeless
inferiority to the other. To capture a
king was to capture not so much a necessary
part of the mechanism of government as
the most important and the richest member
of a feudal organisation. It meant the
power to claim an enormous feudal ransom
for his person. It meant, more doubtfully,
the power to engage him, while he was yet
a prisoner, to terms that would bind his
lieges : " more doubtfully," because the
whole feudal system jealously regarded
the rights both of individual owners and
of custom from the peasant to the crown.
Finally, to capture the king was to get
hold of the chief financial support of an
enemy. A feudal king had vast revenues
in the shape of rents, not competitive, but
118 POITIERS
fixed, which came to him as they did to
any other lord, but in much greater amount
than to any other lord. The king was the
chief economic factor in that autonomous
economic federation which we call the
feudal organisation of Gaul.
The fact that his capture was an accident
in no way lessened the result ; it was re-
garded in the military mind of those days
much as we regard the crippling of a modern
financial power by some chance of specula-
tion. It was only a bit of good fortune on
the one side, and of bad fortune on the
other, but one to be duly taken advantage
of by those whom it would profit.
The immediate result of that capture
was twofold : an admission on the part
of John of the Plant agenet claim, and a
corresponding spontaneous movement in
France which led to the defeat of that claim ;
the signing (ultimately) of a treaty tear-
ing the French monarchy in two ; and,
finally, the rejection and nullifying of that
treaty by the mere instinct of the nation.
But these lengthy political consequences
followed by the further success of the Black
Prince's nephew at Agincourt, and again
by his successor's loss of all save Calais
do not concern this book.
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